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Pick a domain you won't regret
Check it first. Then go buy it.
Your domain is your street address on the internet. You can move offices, redo the logo, replace the whole team — but once the domain is on business cards and in other people's bookmarks, it follows you for life. Twenty minutes now beats twenty thousand dollars later.
Domain checkup
Type the name you have in mind. Results appear as you type, computed here in your browser.
Type something above and the checkup starts.
Where to look it up
Grouped by the question you are trying to answer, not by company. Each entry says when to use it instead of the one above it.
| When to use it | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Instant Domain Search | Is it still available | Free | Results appear as you type, across many endings at once. Fastest way to burn through ten candidates. |
| Domainr | Is it still available | Free | Shows near-misses and creative endings for a word, including ones you would not have thought to try. |
| Namecheap | Is it still available | Paid | Mainstream registrar with free WHOIS privacy included for life on most endings. |
| Porkbun | Is it still available | Paid | Cheap renewals and free privacy; the interface is plain, which is the point. |
| Cloudflare Registrar | Is it still available | Paid | Sells at cost with no markup and no first-year discount, so the price you see is the price forever. Requires moving your DNS there. |
| Vercel Domains | Is it still available | Paid | Type one name and it lists hundreds of endings with availability and first-year price side by side, sortable by length. Our combine page asks the same registrar behind it. |
| Dynadot | Is it still available | Paid | Strong bulk search and an auction arm; useful when you are checking dozens of names at once. |
| NameSilo | Is it still available | Paid | Low renewal prices and free privacy, with a bulk tool that takes a pasted list of names. |
| GoDaddy | Is it still available | Paid | The largest registrar, and the one most aggressive about extras at checkout. Useful for its inventory and aftermarket reach. |
| Gandi | Is it still available | Paid | European registrar with clear pricing and no upsell theatre; supports many country endings others do not. |
| Alibaba Cloud Domains | Is it still available | Paid | The practical choice for .cn and for sites that will need an ICP filing, since the filing runs through the hosting provider. |
| Tencent Cloud DNSPod | Is it still available | Paid | Second mainland option, paired with its own DNS service; compare renewal prices against the first before choosing. |
| ICANN Lookup | Who owns it and when it expires | Free | The official lookup, run by the body that oversees the whole system. Start here — everything else is a reseller of this data. |
| RDAP.org | Who owns it and when it expires | Free | The machine-readable successor to WHOIS. Returns clean structured data — better than any prettified page when you want the facts. |
| who.is | Who owns it and when it expires | Free | Readable WHOIS with history, for when the raw record is hard to parse. |
| ViewDNS.info | Who owns it and when it expires | Free tier | A box of small lookups in one place: reverse IP, DNS records, port checks, IP history. |
| USPTO Trademark Search | Trademark registers | Free | United States trademark search, free and authoritative. Check it even if you are not American — the US market is where disputes get expensive. |
| EUIPO Trademark Search | Trademark registers | Free | The EU office's own trademark search, covering all EU member states in one query. |
| WIPO Global Brand Database | Trademark registers | Free | The global brand database of the UN's intellectual property agency; the widest single search available. |
| CNIPA Trademark Search | Trademark registers | Free | Mainland China's official trademark search. Required reading before using a name commercially there. |
| J-PlatPat | Trademark registers | Free | Japan's official industrial property search, covering trademarks alongside patents and designs. |
| Wayback Machine | What this domain did before you | Free | Shows what was published on this domain in the past. Read a few captures before buying anything with a history. |
| Google Safe Browsing Report | What this domain did before you | Free | Whether browsers currently flag the domain as dangerous. A red result here means visitors see a full-page warning. |
| URLVoid | What this domain did before you | Free | Checks the domain against a few dozen reputation engines at once. |
| MXToolbox Blacklist Check | What this domain did before you | Free tier | Mail blacklist check. If the domain is listed, your outgoing mail silently disappears into spam folders. |
| Spamhaus Blocklist Check | What this domain did before you | Free | The blocklist most mail providers actually consult. Being listed here is the expensive kind of listed. |
| Namechk | Matching handles | Free tier | One search across a long list of social platforms and it tells you where the handle is free. |
| Namelix | Coming up with candidates | Free tier | Generates short invented brand names from keywords. Good for finding a shape, then check it here. |
| Lean Domain Search | Coming up with candidates | Free | Pairs your keyword with common words and shows only the .com names still free. |
| NameMesh | Coming up with candidates | Free tier | Splits suggestions into categories — short, similar, new, SEO — which makes the trade-offs visible. |
| TLD-List | Comparing prices | Free | Registration, renewal and transfer prices for every ending, side by side. Sort by renewal. |
| DomComp | Comparing prices | Free | Price comparison with current coupons; useful for the first year, useless for the decision. |
| Sedo | Buying one that is already taken | Paid | The largest domain marketplace; most listed names have an asking price you can negotiate. |
| Afternic | Buying one that is already taken | Paid | Marketplace wired into many registrar search boxes, so listed names show up as buy-now while you are searching. |
| Atom | Buying one that is already taken | Paid | Curated brandable names sold with a logo; expensive, but the naming work is already done. |
| GoDaddy Auctions | Buying one that is already taken | Paid | The biggest auction pool, including expiring domains being auctioned before they drop. |
| GoDaddy Closeout Domains (via ExpiredDomains.net) | Buying one that is already taken | Free tier | Closeout domains are expired names whose auction ended with no bidder: the price drops daily until someone buys at a fixed price, no bidding. This list makes them filterable by age, backlinks and price, which the registrar's own page will not do. |
| ExpiredDomains.net | Buying one that is already taken | Free tier | Filterable lists of domains about to be deleted, with age and backlink data. A free account unlocks the filters that matter. Separate from the closeout list above: these are not yet for sale, they are about to drop. |
| DropCatch | Buying one that is already taken | Paid | Backorder service that competes to register a domain the second it is deleted. |
| DNSChecker | After you own it | Free | Shows what your DNS record looks like from servers around the world, so you can see propagation actually finishing. |
| DNSViz | After you own it | Free | Draws the full delegation chain, which is how you find the misconfiguration that only breaks for some visitors. |
How to choose
What actually makes a domain good
Not taste. Every rule below exists because breaking it costs you traffic, money or the name itself.
Short enough to say in one breath
Twelve characters or fewer for the name itself. The test is not how it looks on screen — it is whether someone can hear it once and type it correctly.
Don't — Cramming what you do into the name: bestcheappdfconverteronline.com
Pass the phone-call test
Say the domain out loud to someone once, with no spelling. If they cannot type it, the name is losing you visitors every single day and you will never see it in any analytics.
Don't — Names that need "that's with a Z" every time you say them
One obvious spelling
Sounds with two spellings (ph/f, c/k/s, z/s, i/y) hand a competitor a domain that catches your typos. If you must use one, buy both and redirect.
Don't — Flickr, Lyft and Tumblr all had to buy the normal spelling later
No hyphens, no digits
Both force you to explain the domain every time you say it, and both create a second version of your name that you do not own.
Don't — my-shop-4-you.com — three explanations in one domain
Don't lock your future into the name
A name that describes today's product becomes a lie the day you add the second one. Amazon sold books; the name survived because it never said so.
Don't — PDFToolbox.com, right up until you launch the image tool
Search the trademark registers before you fall in love
Domain registration and the right to trade under a name are two different systems. The registrar will happily sell you a name you are not allowed to use.
Don't — Paying for logo, packaging and ads first, searching second
Check what the domain did before you
A previously registered domain can arrive with a spam history, a mail blacklist entry, or an archive full of content you do not want associated with you. All three are visible for free before you buy.
Don't — Discovering the blacklist after your first customer email bounces
Take the matching handles at the same time
Handles cost nothing and cannot be bought back later. Grab them the same hour you register the domain, even if you have no plans to post.
Don't — Finding out a year later that your name is a dormant account from 2013
Assume people will type .com
Whoever owns the .com of your name receives the traffic of everyone who typed it from memory. Before choosing another ending, go look at who that is and what they do.
Don't — Choosing .io while the .com hosts an active competitor
Bring ten candidates, not one
With one candidate every check becomes a negotiation with yourself. With ten, you can afford to drop the ones with problems — which is the only way the checks are worth running.
Don't — Spending two weeks trying to justify the one name you already love
Ways to coin one
Ways to coin a name that is still available
The good short English words ran out years ago. What is left is not luck — it is method. This section is a working list: observations about what is gone, and the ways people are actually coining names that still register today.
- Observation
Every short .com is already taken
Assume the name you thought of is registered. It almost certainly is, and often by someone parking it rather than using it. The useful question stopped being "is it free" a decade ago; it is now "what shape of name is still free", and that is a question about method, not luck.
What it costs you — Chasing a taken .com into the aftermarket turns a twelve-dollar decision into a four-figure one.
- Observation
Words that describe what you do are gone first
Tool nouns and plain function words — invoice, schedule, convert, cloud, data, task — were the first wave and the deepest mined. Worse, even when a variant is free, a name that describes today's product becomes a lie the day you ship the second one. The exit is not a longer descriptive phrase; it is a name that can *mean* your product rather than *describe* it.
What it costs you — Descriptive names are also the hardest to defend as a trademark: you cannot stop competitors from describing themselves accurately.
- Observation
Where the space actually is now
Three seams are still open: names made of two ordinary words nobody thought to join, names invented outright, and names from languages other than English. All three share one property — nobody was searching for them, because they did not exist until you made them.
What it costs you — A name nobody was searching for is also a name nobody recognises. You are buying availability with the cost of having to teach it.
- Method
Invent the word outright
Build a pronounceable string that means nothing yet. It is the only method with an effectively unlimited supply, and the only one where the .com is usually free. Keep it to two or three syllables and make sure it survives being read aloud once.
Seen in — Kodak · Xerox · Zynga · Vimeo · Twilio
What it costs you — It means nothing on day one, so every bit of meaning has to be paid for in marketing.
- Method
Join two ordinary words
Take two words that both already mean something and fuse them. The result is instantly readable, carries some meaning for free, and lives in a search space large enough that plenty of it is still unregistered.
Seen in — Pinterest · Instagram · Microsoft · Snapchat · Netflix
What it costs you — Fuse the wrong pair and you get an accidental third word. Read the joined string with fresh eyes before you fall in love.
- Method
Build from Latin, Greek or old roots
Roots carry a shape of meaning without being a word anyone owns. They sound deliberate rather than random, which is the main thing that separates a coined name from a typo.
Seen in — Verizon · Nvidia · Acura · Sonos · Altria
What it costs you — Overused roots (-tech, -sys, neo-, omni-) read as dated the moment the wave passes.
- Method
Drop a vowel, respell the sound
A once-dominant way to free up a taken word. It still works mechanically — the domain will be available — but understand what you are trading.
Seen in — Flickr · Tumblr · Lyft · Grindr
What it costs you — You will spend the life of the product spelling it out loud, and the properly spelled domain belongs to someone else. Our own checkup flags this shape — deliberately.
- Method
Put a verb in front of a taken word
get, try, use, join, with, hey — bolted onto a word you could never have registered alone. It reads as an invitation rather than a workaround, and it is the most common shape among products launched in the last few years.
Seen in — getpocket.com · tryhackme.com · joinhoney.com · withpersona.com
What it costs you — The bare word still belongs to someone else, and they will always outrank you when people search for it.
- Method
Add a suffix that means "a thing that does this"
-ify, -ly, -hub, -kit, -flow, -base, -stack, -craft. Cheap to generate, immediately parseable, and there are enough combinations left that a search usually turns something up.
Seen in — Shopify · Spotify · Calendly · Netlify · Contentful
What it costs you — These suffixes date hard. A name built on the suffix of its decade announces its decade forever.
- Method
Let the ending finish the word
Read the dot as a letter and the ending becomes part of the name. It buys you extremely short, memorable strings that no .com search would ever surface.
Seen in — bit.ly · dub.co · fal.ai · del.icio.us
What it costs you — You inherit that country's politics and pricing, people will still type the .com out of reflex, and it does not survive being read over the phone.
- Method
Borrow from myth, sky and nature
Gods, constellations, minerals, animals, weather. Real words with real weight that were never tool nouns, so the descriptive land rush never touched most of them.
Seen in — Nike · Oracle · Amazon · Apollo · Hermes
What it costs you — The famous ones went long ago and the rest need a story to connect them to what you actually do.
- Method
Use a language that is not English
Pinyin, Japanese, Nordic, Italian, Latin. An entire vocabulary that English-speaking domain squatters were never scanning, and one that can carry exact meaning for the market you actually serve.
Seen in — Xiaomi · Meituan · Klarna · Miro · Kaizen
What it costs you — Check what it means in the other markets you might enter later. This is the method with the highest chance of an expensive accident.
- Method
Two syllables, ending on a vowel
Not a source of words so much as a filter over them. Short, open-ended sounds are the easiest to say, the easiest to hear correctly over a phone, and the easiest to turn into a verb.
Seen in — Figma · Miro · Notion · Loom · Stripe
What it costs you — It narrows the field hard. Use it to choose between candidates, not to generate them.
- Method
Take a common word somewhere it does not belong
A plain word from an unrelated domain — a fabric, a shape, a piece of hardware, a slack rope. The contrast is what makes it stick, and unrelated vocabularies were never picked over by people in your industry.
Seen in — Slack · Square · Stripe · Monzo · Palantir
What it costs you — Common words are expensive on the aftermarket and weak as trademarks in their original field.
- Method
In the Chinese market, shape is the currency
Four and five letter initial-strings, doubled letters, ABAB, palindromes, all-same. These trade as a category of their own, priced by form rather than by meaning — which is exactly why our marketplace snapshot buckets listings by shape.
Seen in — qqgqq.com · aabb.com · ddmgw.com
What it costs you — Shape has no meaning outside the market that prices it. A four-letter string is a commodity abroad.
Which ending to pick
Think twice about anything that is not .com. Not because the others are bad, but because .com is what people type when they are not thinking — and most of the time they are not thinking.
| Ending | Good for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| .com | Everything. If it is available, stop reading and register it. | Almost nothing short is left, and the resale price for a good one starts in the thousands. |
| .net | A fallback when the .com is taken and you cannot rename. | Reads as "the one that couldn't get the .com", and mail typed from memory still goes to the .com. |
| .org | Non-profits, foundations, open-source projects, standards bodies. | Anyone can register it, but visitors will still assume you are non-commercial and may be annoyed to find pricing. |
| .co | Startups and short brandable names when the .com is gone. | It is Colombia's country ending, and it is one keystroke from .com — you will lose typed traffic and mail forever. |
| .io | Developer tools and technical products, where the audience recognises it instantly. | Expensive to renew, and it belongs to a territory whose sovereignty is being transferred — a long-term uncertainty no marketing page will mention. |
| .ai | Anything where being read as an AI company is an advantage. | Among the most expensive common endings, often sold in two-year minimums, and the association dates as fast as the hype cycle. |
| .dev | Developer-facing sites, documentation, personal engineering pages. | HTTPS is enforced at the browser level, so plain HTTP will not work at all — fine in production, occasionally annoying in local setups. |
| .app | Mobile and web applications, download pages. | Same enforced HTTPS as .dev, and it says "app" about a product that may outgrow being one. |
| .me | Personal sites, portfolios, individual professional identity. | Montenegro's country ending; renewal is well above the .com price and it reads as personal rather than corporate. |
| .xyz | Side projects and experiments where the cost of being wrong is one year of registration. | Heavily used by spam operations, so some corporate mail filters score it down before a human ever sees your message. |
| .info | Reference and documentation sites where the name explains the purpose. | A long history of low-quality use has left it with a reputation problem it has never shaken off. |
| .shop | Online stores where the ending doubles as the description. | Locks the domain to selling things, and renewal is several times a .com. |
| .tv | Video, streaming, broadcast-style content. | Tuvalu's country ending, priced as a premium ending — expect a renewal in the tens of dollars every year. |
| .cn | Doing business in mainland China, where a local ending builds trust. | Requires verified real-name registration, and a public site on it needs an ICP filing before it will resolve for visitors inside China. |
| .jp | Serving the Japanese market, where a local ending is close to expected. | Requires an address in Japan, costs noticeably more than a .com, and the .co.jp variant additionally requires a registered Japanese company. |
| .de | The German market, one of the largest country-ending markets in the world. | Needs an administrative contact with a German address, so a purely foreign company usually needs a local partner or a service that provides one. |
Traps
Traps we have walked into
None of these are secrets. They are just never on the page where you click buy.
The first year is a price tag, not a discount
One dollar for the first year and fifteen every year after is not a promotion — it is how the price is designed. Look up the renewal price before you compare anything.
WHOIS privacy is not free everywhere
Some registrars include it, some charge yearly for it. Without it, your name, address and phone number are in a public database that spammers read daily.
Sixty days before you can move it
After registering, after transferring in, and after changing the registrant details, the domain is locked to that registrar for sixty days. Pick the registrar you actually want the first time.
Letting it expire costs far more than renewing
Once past the grace period a domain enters redemption, and getting it back typically costs eighty to two hundred dollars on top of the renewal — assuming nobody else takes it.
Country endings come with country politics
A country-code ending is administered under that country's rules, which can change. Some also require a local address or company to hold the domain at all.
Cheap endings are cheap once
The promotional endings that cost almost nothing in year one are also the ones with the steepest renewal jumps, and the ones some mail filters treat with the most suspicion.
Skip the extras in the shopping cart
Site builders, email packages, SSL certificates and "protection" plans added at checkout are the registrar's actual business. You can add any of them later, from anyone, usually cheaper or free.
Don't let one company hold the domain and the site
When the registrar is also the host, a billing dispute or a policy change takes both down at once, and moving away is deliberately made slow.
The domain is only as safe as the email you registered it with
Whoever controls that inbox can start a transfer. Use an address with two-factor authentication that is not hosted on the domain itself.
The order to do it in
Doing these out of order is how people end up paying to undo a decision.
Write down ten candidates
Ten, in a text file, before you check anything. See principle ten.
Run each one through the checkup
Free, instant, and it removes about half of them before you spend any time on lookups.
Check availability
Any registrar search box will do. Do not register yet.
Check trademarks, history and handles
This is the step everyone skips, and it is the only one that can cost you the name after you have paid.
Compare the renewal price, not the first-year price
You will pay the renewal price every year for as long as the project lives. The first-year price you pay once.
Lock it down the same day
Auto-renew on, WHOIS privacy on, registrar lock on, two-factor on the registrar account. A stolen domain is almost never recovered.