HN Explorer

Are all the good domains taken?

25 points by iusealot ↗ HN
Are there any good desirable domain names left? Or are they all taken?

AFAIK, 3 and 4 letter domains are all gone, but are there any good 5 or 6 letter domains left? Have you found them?

43 comments

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rantfoil
www.nameboy.com is useful.

Also, searchyc.com can yield lots of threads re: how to find more domains.

jamess
Not all the good ones are gone, but it's certainly getting increasingly hard to find a sensible domain name. What worked for me recently is although I couldn't find a domain name that wasn't taken, I found a good one that was registered but isn't in use, then used the coarse expedient of offering the owner a few hundred quid for it.

My main concern is that most of the domains are ending up owned by a very few individuals concerned only with slapping cheap advertising on them. I refuse to attempt to buy domains from these bottom feeders, and I would suggest that everyone else do likewise. However, it's an increasing problem that's going to require either the advertising industry or ICANN to crack down on one of these days.

kleevr
I think there are a fair amount of 5 letter domains out there yet. (here are the few 5-6 I've registered: kleevr.com, kratr.com, rabyt.com, exphi.com, excyt.com, xcytr.com, zroone.com, onezro.com, grabyt.com)

Whether these qualify as 'good domains' might be in the eye of the beholder, but I like them and have pretty good ideas sketched up for most of them.

swombat
5-letter doesn't necessarily mean good. For instance, the 5-letter domains mentioned by kleevr in another post (kleevr.com, kratr.com, rabyt.com, exphi.com, excyt.com, xcytr.com, zroone.com, onezro.com, grabyt.com) might be nice and geeky, but good luck trying to get someone to remember them.

There's plenty of good stuff in 6/7-letters. I recently registered flails.org for an open-source project, and my latest business runs on Woobius.com. Both are clear and easy to remember (and, we reckon, not lame).

Daniel

kleevr
I think domains themselves will be old news before too long anyways. I think OpenDNS is working on some cool ideas in the area.

I bought a domain like CarTrust.com for about $400, wanted to build a site to fix the 'how to find a good mechanic' problem, but recently realized car care wasn't a core passion of mine, so I passed the domain on to someone else. I'd spend at least two weeks playing on registrars before checking out the auctions, because if you work at it long enough I'm positive you'll find something you like that's unregistered.

brk
There are places like Namejet you can use to know when "good" names are expiring also.

Personally, I think that people give too much merit to the short domain names. There is some value to a 4-6 letter domain name, but it's not the be-all/end-all.

jrockway
There are probably still 4 letter domain names in .us (and friends). I got jrock.us a few years ago -- nice-n-short :)
epi0Bauqu
"Just" and a "few years ago" don't really mesh :) And jrock is 5 letters! Sorry if this is coming off differently than I mean it--I just think this comment is funny.
jrockway
Well, a "few years ago" is wayyy past 1994 when there were still usable domains left.
thorax
There are still some okay 4 letter domains out there, too, in .COM.

The best I managed to grab recently was 1FTW.com.

axod
A lot of them are gone, which is what you get when you make the cost of registering a domain pretty much free. IMHO it'd be far better to make the cost of registering a domain a few hundred dollars a year.

As it is you can just register domains, slap advertising on them, and you make a slow profit.

ra
A great option is to look at expiring names for domains being dropped because domainers couldn't monetize them.

A good tool is this, look at the tdnam expiring list: http://www.freshdrop.net/expiring_names.php

Just filter out everything except .com, and have a scan through. Hundreds of names drop each day. Minimum cost is $10 + reg fee, which is another $10 per year.

Right now I can see these dropping today, with no takers yet:

waffly.com zanze.com upbreak.com tibbu.com serific.com foxtrots.com frankable.com measurably.com

It's a gold mine!

Rich

sabat
Excellent tip, Rich; thanks very much for posting.
adrianwaj
Heaps of domains left.

Your ideal domain + an extra short common word at the end of it: tip, now, it, ify, zone, space, net, repeat word + .com

pchristensen
That's what 37signals does: basecamphq.com, backpackit.com, highrisehq.com, campfirenow.com
axod
and it always means I go to basecamp.com or campfire.com and then remember...
nertzy
And projectpath.com (among other choices) for the actual Basecamp account. It doesn't even have the name in it! But it doesn't need to.

Having the commonly used name isn't always a great idea anyway. You might want to avoid python.com (NSFW), for example. But the Python folks could have easily gotten codepython./com|net|org/

rob
Pretty much all of the generic, single/double words and three character domains are gone (and the people who own them are making $$$), but I've still found some good ones by adding two words together and being creative. It's just a little harder today than it was in 1999.
coderrr
There may be no 4 letter, but there are still lots of 4 digit [a-z0-9-] .com domain names. Maybe not ones that you want, but they're there.

example: i48u.com, o440.com, u0-0.com, etc...

anotherjesse
I got fu2o.com and dr2o.com a few months ago - I'm not using either and have too many projects so if you want them email me
STHayden
I often wonder ho this will scare over the next 10, 20, 30 years. It's hard enough now... by 2037 will there be any domain left?
mynameishere
No, but you'll definitely be able to get what you need, when you need it.
sc
It's not always about size. Sometimes it's about memorability. I think we're way past the point of "web 2.0"-y names being memorable (though some will still make it out of obfuscation).

Take a word or two that work well with your idea. There are millions of these small combinations out there.

[deleted]
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jgfoot
I know that marketing types tell us to ignore everything except .com, but is that still valid in 2008? There are a kajillion of TLDs available for global registration now, and many have lots of English-word domains available.
silencio
I had one domain name I wanted for my personal site, and the .com was taken (and not even available for an extortionate amount despite that there was only advertising on there), so I got that name .org and .net.

Unless people knew/looked up my address from an email or business card, people kept going to the .com address..and sent email to the .com address as well and got "no such address" replies back. Then they'd call me up or something and bother me about it. Even my mom sent emails to the .com address.

Eventually I gave up and got another name that ended in .com, and I haven't had problems yet. Plus, it's something fairly memorable (if you know me) and also the first few google results for the name :D

I suppose the big problem is that even with the big name sites (del.icio.us comes to mind), some people have a hard time remembering "delicious" as being del.icio.us and instead go to delicious.com (I think I even heard something about them changing the main site address to .com...edit: it was from a TC article about the new preview.). It's been too ingrained into people's heads. It's probably not going to change anytime soon.

edit the second because it just popped up in my head: I might note this probably depends on where you live (or more specifically, where your visitors live). .com seems to be the default TLD people think of (sometimes the only one) in the US. Meanwhile it's not necessarily the case e.g. in South Korea, where .co.kr is just as well known as .com, et cetera.

edit the third because I haven't fully woken up yet (although it's 1pm PDT): I'm the general computer person for a small nonprofit in Southern California. We have a .org address, and you'd imagine it would be appropriate to use a .org address and that people would remember it. Nope. We're now considering buying the .com and redirecting to the .org because people have trouble associating a .org with an organization.

petercooper
A 5 or 6 letter domain name isn't necessarily significantly better than a, say, 7 or 8 letter domain name. twitter.com is much better than twtr.com or similar.

The trick nowadays, unless you want some unpronounceable nonsense, is to conjoin two words in some way. Let's assume your site's main topic / product / quality is "widgets." You could go with things like: gowidgets, widgetstoday, hotwidgets, redwidgets, widgetman, widgetway, widgetinside, widgetwise.. you'll find a significant amount of domains with this technique that are free to register. It does take a lot of thinking and testing to find something that's good though! You can't just join anything.

pchristensen
That kind tend to be more forgettable precisely because there are so many combinations of words. For example, it's been a decade or so and I still don't remember if a given office supply store is Office Max or Office Depot. But I do know if it's a Staples or not.
petercooper
That's the job of branding. Microsoft, Slashdot, Burger King, Coca Cola, TechCrunch, General Motors, Morgan Stanley and Mercedes Benz aren't particularly forgettable (even though Microsoft is about as generic as it gets!)

I'm not sure there are significantly more successful single word brands than longer named brands, although it certainly seems to be true online.

wrigley
We bought OFF2.com from snapnames about 1 1/2 years ago, $60 as was expiring, we are a travel website so its a great name for us
mrtron
I recently (Feb 2008?) got a 4 letter domain, but it does include numbers.
crazeinc
If you're willing to part with a little cash, you can find some decent ones for not very much. I didn't pay over $40 last year for vjot.com
buss
There are still good domains out there. I just bought nect.us, for example (so I can do con.nect.us)
spydez
The problem I have with those del.icio.us type urls is that I have a really hard time remembering where the dots go.

Way back when del.icio.us was just getting popular, someone told me about it. When I got home, I tried "delicio.us", "delicious.com", "de.licio.us", etc. Had to resort to googling to find the place.

Also, you have "con.nect.us", but who has "connect.us"? I think they'll be getting a lot of your traffic...

Kaizyn
Names are out there, but you just have to be a bit more creative about picking them. You also need to be a bit more flexible about what you're willing to accept in having a domain that 'has bad spelling' or other quirks.