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Work Abroad

Choosing your Domain Name - Webmaster on the road

By Roadjunky, Posted Oct 23, 2006

domain name

Don't let your dot.coms become not.coms http://www.flickr.com/photos/headley/

So how do you start?

First, you need to buy a domain. This should be strongly related to your idea or concept for your website or else be a catchy new name like www.kazaa.com that doesn’t men anything but stays in the mind. Domains only cost around $10 a year but don’t expect to be able to buy exactly what you’re looking for – www.goodidea.com was bought a long time ago. In fact, every singular word in the English language already now belongs to someone. More than that, every single 3 letter or digit-dot-com has been bought up and almost all the four letter combinations have also gone.

food dot com

Your most ingenious one word domain spark of brilliance has probably been bought already http://www.flickr.com/photos/shannonclark/

What you’re looking for is a catchy combination of words that people will remember, preferably without you having to spell it out for them. So if you’re running a site about French cinema, www.frenchfilms.com will probably no longer be available but a combination like www.filmsenfrancais.com might still be open.

Then again www.filmsoffrance.com might be a better bet – check what’s available on domainchecker.com and then ask everyone you meet what they think of the name and if they like the sound of it. You need a good brand for your site and if it’s catchy and descriptive then that’s 20% of the battle already won.

Then you need to host your site on a server – one of the giant computers which are the nuts and bolts of the internet. Server costs can be between $100-500 a year depending on how much space you need. Files of text and images won’t take up much space but full length audio and video files will – then again you can always host the latter on free sites like youtube and just imbed them on your site.


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