Check the availability of a domain - no obligation.   www. .com .net .org   1. Enter a Name    2. Choose an Extension    3. Click GO!

TIPS ON HOW TO CHOOSE A DOMAIN NAME

The domain name is your online identity.  You want to make sure that you pick the best suitable domain for your web site.  

Domains Registered for Business.  

With approximately 64,000 domain names registered every day, it is getting more and more difficult to find a name that you would like to have for your business or personal use.  It is not as bad as it sounds.  There are still many dot com domains available if you have the patience and the know-how to find them.  

Sometimes searching for a domain name takes weeks or even months.  For our real estate company, we chose the domain name webstreetrealty.com.  It would have been great if we were able to register the domain name realty.com,  but we couldn't since the name was registered since 1995.  So, we had to compromise.  After many tries and many months of searching, we have accepted the domain name out of a dozen domains names we registered.  It is a very difficult task, but as a rule of thumb, if you are not willing to purchase a domain name that has been already registered and you are not willing to pay big money to buy one from the secondary market, put in mind the following when you are doing your search:

1. The .com .net extensions should be your first target.  In our opinion, a lousy .com or .net is better than the best of the rest.  The only time we recommend that you buy the other extensions is when you are trying to protect a domain name you own from being used by a third party who may be just trying to take advantage of your name brand which should be protected through trademarks and alternative similarity of the name you have.  For example, it's a good idea if you own amazon.com to also have iamazon, eamazon, i-amazon, e-amazon and any other similarity that is available to protect your domain name.

2. Find the shortest domain name that describes the business you are about to identify.  More importantly, the domain name should mean something, even if the name is longer than those which do not mean anything.  This rule does not apply to 2 and 3-letter domains.  The domains that will attract attention are those with the coolest sound and the funkiest tone.  

3. Those which begin with i, e, info, next, world, planet, universal, US, net, web, metro, digital, digi, euro, are next.  Names that represent well known landmarks like the red sea or amazon are easy to brand and accept by consumers.  

4. Unknown abbreviations or trademark similarities are discouraged.  Many names we see available for sale have no meaning which makes them difficult to use for business or resale.

5. Our multiple registration search engine has many uses.  You can get text from anywhere and copy and paste the text into the search box.  Add .com to the end of each word or word combination (leave no spaces).  Use the enter button to separate each .com word or phrase in the list.  You can process up to 60 entries this way. 

Domains Registered for Resale

1.  After the prices of prime domain names hit an all time high - achieving $7.5 million for business.com, $5 million for asseenonntv.com, and $3 million for altavista.com, the prices have recently dropped.  This is what is referred to in real estate as a down cycle.  This down cycle was created primarily as a result of the market saturation with domain names for resale.  Many sellers have preferred to cash in and sell their domain names at the best offered price regardless of the value of the domains.  

We have seen some very valuable domains go for very low prices on different penny auction web sites.  Adding to this,  many new companies do not mind any longer to have just a name for their business rather than buying an expensive aftermarket domain name that can cost in the six figures range (BIG MISTAKE).   There are many startups with laughable domain names and most likely they will realize this fact after it is too late.  

The future value for high quality domain names, .com .net .org, remains very promising regardless of the number of name extensions which are being aggressively create.  The major buyers for those names are the dot com companies who try to protect their trademarks by purchasing every relevant domain extension.  This is like going to the horse races and boxing out the favorite in every possible combination, but  does not reflect the real reason for purchasing the new extensions for domain names.  The fact remains that the number of web sites that use those extensions is very small and we do not expect this trend to change in the near future.   We continue to believe that there are many choices available in those categories to last for many, many years to come without the need of creating new extensions.  However, we do believe that some valuable domain names can lie within the local market categories for those extensions.  For example:  .co.uk is a great name to have if your business is in the UK or you believe that having a distinction as being in a certain geographic area is a plus.  

Domains Registered for Future Use 

Until there is a new invention, the internet will continue to be an important if not the most important part of e-commerce and beyond.  The price today is very very cheap.  Buying a domain name to keep for future use or resale could be similar to buying a beachfront property a century ago and keeping it to sell it in today's market, however we do not expect that you will have to wait that long.  The number of registered domain names is expected to reach threefold what it is today.