In Search of the Perfect Domain Name

One of the hardest parts of making a website is coming up with a good domain name (AKA address).  Or rather, it’s not hard to come up with a good one, but it’s very likely that whatever you come up with has already been registered by somebody else.

I’ve been pretty happy with "nodivisions.com," even though it’s a tad long and may be tricky for some people to spell.  Those two issues aren’t really a big deal for me though because most of my visitors come from Google or from links on other websites, where you don’t need to manually type in the address.

My home computer has always been named stop.dyndns.org, which I think is really good (among *.dyndns.org names) because the part that I got to choose ("stop") is so short and easy to remember.  But this address doesn’t need to be remembered or typed by anyone except me, so again those issues don’t matter that much.  Still, lately I’ve wanted to give it a new name -- one that isn’t tied to dyndns.org, one that’s a top-level name instead of a subdomain.

Well, last night I came up with one that’s awesome and available: antio.net.  (It’s pronounced "ANT ee oh" or "AN tee oh.")  Scoring a 5-letter domain name is virtually unheard-of, especially one that has any meaning or relevance, and that is pronounceable too.  As you can see, the dot-com version has been registered by one of those stupid domain-squatting companies, and they’re selling it for $700, on top of the normal $10 yearly fee.  (Normally, domain names have no cost other than the yearly fee.)

So now, when I’m at work or at someone else’s house and want to connect to my home system (to view my home desktop, check email and IMs, access files, etc), I’ll be connecting to antio.net instead of stop.dyndns.org.  I like this new name so much, I’m even considering renaming my website to it; but that’s a much more drastic move, with implications for my Google rankings among other things, so for now that won’t happen.