I am a student looking to put up my portfolio on my site but while searching for appropriate domain names I realized I have very limited options since I have an apparently common name.

FirstNameLastName.com is taken

FirstName.com / FirstName.Net is taken

LastName.com / LastName.Net is taken

FirstNameLastName.Net is available but doesn't sound fine.

I have no middle name/initial, so that is also out the window. Also, I can't shorten my First name or last name because either they don't exist or are only a secondary level domain. I also don't want to keep a word after my name because I'm still in business school and want to have an open option for career choices.

The specific one I am looking for is the one where you give a word and it will lookup all the odd spellings and variants. I cannot remember the name, can anyone, or perhaps suggest another? The site in question had a command line tool as well (I think third party).

Edit: found at http://domai.nr/ and Github has the cmd line utility.

I want to purchase a website domain simply for the purpose of being able to have a unique personal email address. I have a very common name so I can’t use Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc without putting a bunch of random numbers and stuff after my name.

So I need help coming up with a catchy domain name. Some buzz words I’ve been thinking about are: outdoors, kinetic, velocity, pursuit, and brown (my last name).

The end goal would be to get an email address of [email protected]. Thanks!

A silly question really, but what do you call your domains? In an enterprise environment it is usually something related to the company name but what do you do at home, since it is a name you would have to be fine with for a long time?

I’m considering using a custom domain for my proton mail account (so if proton ever goes belly up I can transfer my email to new provider), and it seems like most people name their domain @firstlast.com, is this a good idea? I plan on using an alias service (ie simplelogin) but it seems weird to use my full name as my domain- wondering how others named their domain and how I should name mine.

I would like to start a guide website for the city I live in, but would like to avoid domains that start/contain words like:

Enjoy Explore Guide Visit Experience

I was thinking of allthingscity.com but it sounds pretty long.

Would appreciate any ideas.

I initially wrote this as a comment over on the Indiehackers community, and then it evolved into a blog post, but I think it's really useful for quickly picking a name and not becoming paralysed/disheartened by your favourites not being available as a .com.

• Only use .com and .io (or .app now, maybe), it simplifies things and they're cheap. Open domainr for quick and easy availability lookup. Domainr is cool because it'll also show you other domains that might suit your keyword too, like if your keyword is mydevportfolio, it'll suggest mydevportfol.io (full disclosure, that's my side project, feedback appreciated) 👍

• SEO is key, so my go-to to start off the process is often things like my[keyword].com, [keyword]hq.com, [keyword]central.com etc. If you're lucky, one of these will be available, but it's getting rarer nowadays. So we need to go deeper.

• Next, I'll look at synonyms. Open up thesaurus.com, type in your main keyword and see what comes back. This can be fed into the rest of the steps to find suitable variations.

• My next port of call is usually looking at [verb/adjective][keyword].domain. Some of my go-to adjectives are: fresh, sharp, open, free, hot. Some of my goto nouns are: spark, air, bounce, break, snap. Feel free to pop these into thesaurus too to find more.

• My next goto if I don't find a suitable one in the steps above us to get a bit creative with language. I'll open up Google translate and translate from English to Latin. Often Latin spits back decent words that don't make sense, but sound cool and can give a nice story to your brand. Put in your keyword and synonyms and see what comes back. This doesn't work all the time, but can spit out gems sometimes.

• If I still haven't found a name I'm happy with, I'll look to the animal kingdom. What emotion do you want a customer to associate with your brand? If its strength, why not use something like lion, bull, rhino, bear. If it's friendliness, try koala, kitten, puppy, panda. Figure out the emotion and then Google to find animals that best fit that. Once you have some to try, combine them with your keyword and/or a verb or noun. So [noun/adjective] [animal].domain. Freshpuppy.io, sparkbear.com. Or if it makes sense, mix up the animal with the keyword. Koalabooks.com, gorrilladesign.io etc. One of the advantages of this approach is it gives you ideas for logos that suit too.

• Colours. I have a blog post on how to "cheat" when picking a colour for your app, basically how to automatically inspire a certain emotion or action in a user. Use this to identify what colours might suit your business, and try inserting them instead of nouns/adejectives. Once you identify the base colour, Google different shades of that colour to get some ideas. Violetbooks.com. Limedesign.io.

• Rhyming. This can be handy to come up with double-barrel business names that rhyme. Pop open rhymer.com and type in your keyword. You'd be surprised what results you get back that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise!

And that's it. What do you think? Let me know if you have a better process, but that's mine for the moment.

I write about this type of thing a lot, and I'm currently trying to build profitable side-businesses as an indie developer. You can follow along over here.

Thanks!

Working on my first niche site selling silk scarves. Just doing some online research on picking the right domain name. Was hoping some of you guys can share your tips.

Without revealing too much I have been looking at domain names today. All the obvious ones I wanted have gone (no surprise there) and some of the close ones are asking for prices between $10-18k.

No thanks.

I guess you just need to be creative to get those $20 names? The trade off seems to be you deviate from your original intention somewhat in terms of a domain name. e.g howtoplaypoker.com may need to become howtoplaydifferentstylesofpokerforbeginners.com …hopefully you get the idea.

Any tips or ideas on how you guys approach the domain name buying process.

thanks

namer.ai is an AI powered domain name generator we built as a side project.

My wife was trying to name her blog and I threw out an offhand comment over dinner about how we could totally build an AI to do that. She asked why we never actually build any of these things we talk about and it turned into a challenge. By late that night we had a dataset of a million domain names and were generating text that looked enough like domain names to encourage us to keep going.

The names aren't all perfect but there are some really good ones in there! There are also some hilarious ones in there. For some reason the internet seems to be biased towards chickens and Seattle.

www.thesmallprojects.com is available, as is a personal favorite of mine www.greatergoats.com

For the AI-inclined: we're using a character-level RNN to generate domain names which we match against the user's query with word vector similarity.

While I've always used a custom domain for business emails, I'm looking to also register a custom domain to use for my personal email communications to use with Proton and SimpleLogin. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to go about brainstorming a domain name for this purpose?

I have a fairly common sounding name, so of course the .com and .net are taken. Let's pretend my name is "James Thompson". I'm trying to brainstorm some ideas here, have you guys ever seen or done anything creative that works? I'm leaning towards purchasing a .cc domain name just because I think it rolls off the tongue better than other lower-level domains, but I'm interested in your input.

Ideas: jamesthompson.cc jamesthompson.me itsjamesthompson.com

Hi. I'm a game programmer and planning to make a personal portfolio.

Sorry if I sound a bit ignorent, this is going to be my first website, and I don't understand too much about naming it.

This is something that should mainly be linked to, on my cv or social media.

I'm wondering what is the suggest way of naming your website. Such as, is firstnamelastname . com a good name. What about programming-firstnamelastname . com.

Does the ending make much difference? Such as . com vs . UK vs . Wales.

Thank you.

The other day I snagged www.exabit.io, I love it... any techie worth their salt gets it... what should I do with it? What domain names do you have that you love?

Every time someone asks me for my email, and I have to give them my gmail address from decades ago, I feel a little embarrassed. Now that I want to rework my portfolio, I think it is time I try once again to find a better fitting domain, for both professional work and use in everyday life.
I am curious what domain names people here chose, when they have a very common name and every variation with first+lastname, with dashes, initials, etc are already taken? I am trying to come up with something that doesn't sound too cringy, using clever prefix/suffix, or a clever use of a lesser known domain ending. Or should I simply give up and pick something entirely unrelated (for email i can still put my name in front of the @.

Looking for some advice/ideas. I am not in the domain business (not selling anything); I own a couple of domains, but mostly from failed or unrealized side projects :)

Anyway, what are some of the exciting domain names you own? Domain names that can generate good discussions around "What could one run/sell/do with that domain name"?

(I've started a podcast with a couple of friends where we discuss business possibilities around domain names, and we're looking for some ideas :))

Any help is appreciated!

UPDATE: Thanks everyone for so many great ideas. I'll let you know if we plan to discuss any of the domains on our podcast

Hey everyone.

Hope you are all doing well.

I have jumped onto the Simple Login bandwagon and really appreciate the service. However, I have come to the conclusion that I would like to use a custom domain name.

Although I have a domain name today (it's "myname.tld"), I don't want to use that for simple login because I think that defeats the purpose.

So I wanted to hear from all of you what do you recommend as best practice for selecting a domain name for simple login? I am happy to chuck $10/year at Cloudflare to get a domain name that I will dedicate to simple login, but just want to make sure I avoid any names that may cause trouble for Simple Login or result in websites, etc not accepting the aliases I create.

Thanks for any guidance you can provide. 😀

Kind of dumb, but did you use your name? Full or abbreviated somehow? What about your top-level name?.name, .com, .com.au (your country). Do you have an order based on availability?

Thanks for any help!

I'm launching a web design and development agency specializing in helping small to medium-sized local businesses create or significantly improve their online presence. I'm looking for a domain that's memorable, clear, professional, and approachable. I own these domains already, I want to pick one from these.

Thanks /webdesign community :)