Foreign Perspectives

You might think that all the sensible short domains have long since gone but if you play around with a domain search for a while you’ll find that surprisingly good names are still around.

Granted, you’re essentially wasting your time trying to pick up a three letter one no matter what the TLD (the bit after the dot) is. Although, having said that, there are some that come up now and again. In principle even one and two letter domains can be had but, in most cases, only if it’s a direct transfer from the current owner to a new owner as any that are not renewed are now permanently out for the majority of TLDs.

However, at four letters, there are lots of decent domains still around. To pick up one you need to get the creative juices flowing. Add a number or hyphen and you’ll dramatically increase the possibilities for yourself: I picked up arn7.com not so long ago and it’s one of many with a digit even within the very popular .com TLD. For personal domains, think of .me: I picked up sfol.me a while back for instance. If you’re planning on mainly using it for email it’s probably better to aim for something like .me rather than .com as it’s that little bit shorter when you’re writing it out.

Pricing-wise, it’s probably best to avoid .tv as it’s generally thought of as a commercial domain and is therefore more expensive to register but other than that many TLDs are at normal prices and, quite importantly, without geographic restrictions eg you don’t need to live in Macedonia to register a .me nor in Tuvalu to register a .tv.