This article explains the thought process I followed to pick the domain name for this website. This could be useful to you as you are trying to figure out a domain name that is both simple, original, not already taken.
Why buy a custom domain name
Before making the investment, the first thing to ask yourself, and this is valid in most of life’s decisions, is whether you really need a custom domain name and if the answer is yes, why you need it.
The answer of course is mostly personal and depends on your finances, life situation, job. A good idea to start is to identify priorities in this moment of your life. Some of my priorities right now are:
- Share my toughts
- Share what I am reading and watching, to provide a stream of information that anyone interested could look at
- Share some projects I am working on
- Build a consistent online identity that will allow people to easily get in contact with me
- Have a place where I can put and find all these things together
Most of these do not explicitly call for a custom domain name. However, the desire to start building a less fragmented online identity and to allow anyone interested (someone said recruiters?) to easily find me, got me to start thinking about buying a custom domain name. Furthermore, the initial expenditure is pretty low so, why not?
The requirements
So I had some questions and the first thing I have done is to see if anybody else already had the answers. Firstsideguide.com had some good tips, as well as whiteboard friday. The general suggestion is to keep the domain name short, easy to remember and to pronounce (two very different things!), and stick with .com, if you can. Obviously the domain name should already give a hint to the visitor on what your website is about. For this reason for personal websites, we often see that a combination of first and last name is used.
The choice
If it is your personal website, it makes sense to try yo go with a classic firstnamelastname.com address. And this is when I had to face the truth: the most obvious domain names for my personal website, marcozanini.com and mzanini.com are already taken!
I then had to come up with a different name, and I brainstormed a lot of them. Some were good and available, some others more complex and less suitable. The problem is that they all sounded a bit strange to me, something more suitable for a company than for a personal website. I then tried to look if the .it version, which is the Italian extension, of the domain name was available, and it was! Actually, both were, both marcozanini.it and mzanini.it were available. I have bought both of them.
The DNS Registar
DNS registrars are organizations that manage the reservation of domain names. Some of the most famous are GoDaddy and Namecheap. They always provide a way to check if your domain name has already been taken or not.
I have done some research to find the one that best suited my needs, here and here you can find some interesting information.
GoDaddy seems to be the most popular, closely followed by Namecheap. I have heard a lot of complaints about GoDaddy behavior and devious practices to try and have you pay more than you need like suggesting unuseful expensive options or making you pay to switch to another DNS registar service. People seem to be generally satisfied with Namecheap. Unfortunately, Namecheap does not provide the option to reserve domains with .it suffix. This forced me to go with another company.
At the end, I went for Gandi.net, it might be a little pricier than other companies but I like the clarity in their offers. So far I have been satisfied with them, even if I didn’t get the chance to play that much with the various options, apart from DNS zone files and redirecting.