D0m41n N4m3s (Domain Names)

You’ve just thought of a brilliant name for a domain to use for your business or personal website. It’s easy to remember and simple for your clients or friends to recall back when they’ve nothing to do in front of their computer.

So you’ve headed over to your preferred domain regisrar service and keyed in the name. Your excitement suddenly disappears into cyberspace and your cheerful smile flips over to a huge frown with frustration. As you might’ve guessed it, your domain has been registered by someone else. Ain’t this a familiar scenario?

It’s really not the first time that gets to you, but the other countless tries or times that you think you want a name to be your domain, but i’s already owned by someone else. You keep on trying to type something almost similar in meaning but end up with the same depressing results.

Other than domain names, we also experience the same thing with email addresses. The advice given when using a free email provider for work related agendas, is that you shouldn’t use your nickname. You should have something like [email protected]. But as you know, many free email providers already would have someone occupying that email address.

So like creating an effective password, what would you do? Try putting numbers into your email address. The more advisable usernames suggested by email providers are like yournameYear. Some become creative and jumble the letters and numbers together or some replace the letters with numbers that look like it.

Here’s a list of numbers that represent certain letters:

• 1 = i / l
• 3 = e
• 4 = a
• 5 = s
• 6 = g (sometimes)
• 7 = t
• 8 = b
• 9 = g
• 0 = o

So I was thinking, what if in the future as the Internet network expanded further, there wouldn’t be anymore room for great .com names? Users who wanted their simple unique names registered don’t have a chance to own a .com domain name anymore.

I’m very worried that in 5 years, the only unique names to be registered would have to be made of replaced letters with numbers. Then later we’ll have domains like d4nnyf00.com *gasp* Not only i it hideous but just unprofessional.

So are there any parties to blame for the lacking unique domains available to be registered? Well, there are those who purchase domain just for the sake of reselling at a much higher price. I’m unaware if this is entirely legal under the laws governed either by the US law or general Internet law anywhere. Need to take a whole month to read the Terms and conditions later.

There are others who also try to hide the fact they’re just holding onto the domain by having a never ending ‘Under Construction’ notice on the domain. They’re just praying on the people who want the domain badly to email them and then they’ll request a price.

And yes, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I was looking for a unique domain name for a business I might be planning to set up and the domain has been registered or is being impounded by some people who make money reselling domain. Eesh!

So if you’ve got a unique domain at the back of your head, better quickly register it now than let scammers or others register it first.