Domains

Domain Names

Your domain name is your single most important piece of your web presence. You need your customers to find you. That is the name of the game.. if they are looking for you and find your competitors site instead, guess who they will buy from. If we use our analogy with websites being like a home, your Top Level Domain equates to the location of your home and the length and ease of memory of your domain equates to the condition of your home.

A top level domain is the end of your domain name such as .com, .org, .net, and so on. Very short and or very easy .com domain names can be extremely pricey up front but once you own them here at GoldKeyHosting.com they will remain yours for about ten bucks a year. You can think of these as the as the Manhattan real estate of domains. If you come across a domain for sale for thousands of dollars, that means the domain is owned by someone else and is selling the domain (think real estate speculation on the internet) GoldKeyHosting.com does not own them, we simply make them available to you.

Domains which are long, have hyphens, clever spellings, or numbers in them are seldom a good buy. These are the “fixer uppers” of the internet. Just like when you buy a home that needs work, it is cheaper up front than a “move in ready home”. You can buy iSellEvery-Thing2Anyone4TheHouz.com but you will spend a fortune trying to get anyone to go to your site. They will never remember it, they won’t be able to spell it, and the only way you will get them to your site is by them clicking on ads that you are paying for as long as that is your domain name. One other thing to note is that ^*domain names are not case sensitive, we capitalize the first letters of each word for ease of readability but GOLDKEYHOSTING.COM, goldkeyhosting.com, and GoldKeyHosting.com are all the same and the internet doesn’t care.

With all that in mind, here are a few suggestions:

1. Keep your domain name relatively short – it doesn’t have to cover everything you do.
   1. Our domain is GoldKeyHosting.com not GoldKeyHostingDomainsEmailandSecureSocketLayerCertificates.com
2. Keep your name easy to spell
   1. You may have the best name but if your customer can’t spell it, they won’t find it
3. Avoid numbers
   1. Use WidgetsForReason.com instead of Widgets4Reason.com or WhatToDo.com not What2do.com
      1. If you insist on a using a number, buy both the for and 4 or the to and 2 versions of the domain
   2. Avoid clever spellings
      1. Do not use DaKillaApp.com or MusakHouz.com because people will search for TheKillerApp.com and MusicHouse.com and again, they will not find you
         1. Once again if you still do this, get the correctly spelled domains as well
      2. .Com is king
         1. If you can find a name that fits the above criteria ending in .com buy it now. With more than 100 Million.com domains already registered, they are getting very difficult to get and are increasing in value every day.
         2. .org is a better choice if you are a non-profit but you should still get the .com version to protect your endeavors from others using you good name for profit after you build up the .org

You may have more than one domain for your website if you would like. You simply register all of them you want and then “forward” them to the same website. For instance, you could register WidgetsForWidgeting.com and then purchase additional names corresponding to every state in the US from WidgetsForWidgetingAL.com for Alabama all the way to WidgetsForWidgetingWY.com for Wyoming and then point every single one to the exact same website.

A final thought on domain names, do not waste time looking for the exact correct domain name. Domains are extremely affordable here at GoldKeyHosting.com and you can own some for less than the equivalent of a buck a month. Register something that will work to get you going and if you come up with a better one later, buy it too and point it to your site. Also, remember that although .com is king, there are over a thousand top level domains to choose from.

Now, Let’s Go Get Your Domain

^{*Some servers do care about case after the / for instance MyDomain.com/URL is not the same as MyDomain.com/url and one of them may not show up at all. It is good practice to always use lower case}