15 1 / 2012
Domain Names
So the worst thing about a new project is picking what to call it. Well even that is easy compared to the time its going to take to get a domain name that you can actually register ! So make sure you all do that in reverse, find a good domain name, register it and then name you project.
My domain name hunts, if i get lucky usually take about a week or so, some have gotten almost a year to get right. All in all everyone has registered every common english name you can possible think of.
So a brand new cool tool I use is called domai.nr, a cool ajax search tool that gives me a cool list of shorthand domain names for my search, that are available. But my main domain search tool is domaintools whois search, which lets me know exactly the domain name im looking for is available or not. I do however wished it had some cool suggestion features. So last but not least a cool tool is godaddys domain auctions, a cool tool to grab domain names that people have dropped, soo awesome and soo cheap, definitely worth the time. If anyone has any other suggestions on domain name search tools, please let me know.
So of course as I was starting out I used Godaddy and Dreamhost to also be my registrar for domain names. This was fine when I was registering a couple of domain names, but it quickly got messy when I started getting more and more clients because its crazy to manage domains. So I took an investment and got a Enom account. Then i transferred all my domains to enom and now I can manage all them in one place. The coolest thing about enom is there api which you can use to check expire dates and search for new domains and many more cool uses.
