It all begins with that domain name.
Whether you are planning to launch a new website, write a blog, develop a web service or establish a start up company – the domain name is one of the important factors which decides the success or failure of your online venture. Choosing the right domain name for your business or organization is necessary because there is no undo button, when you have registered one.
Almost all the domain registrars have their own domain name suggestion tools, but there are basically two problems with them. First, the domain name suggestion tools are self promoting, which means that you are shown only those domains who comes at the cost of high price. The tools will randomly match common terms with your keyword and provide alternate domain name suggestions which might not relate to your business plan at all.
The second disadvantage of using domain name suggestion tools is that some of the registrars reserve your keywords and suggest the available domain name to other prospective buyers. Let’s say you devoted 2 hours of time and found a very unique domain name e.g “laptopcasesforstudents.org”. Feeling very happy, you went to bed thinking – “I will buy this domain name when I have transferred the money from my bank to the Paypal account”.
When you come back to register the domain, you find that it has already been registered by another person. The result: your research was wasted just because the registrar showed your domain suggestion to someone else.
In this article, we will discuss some of the best domain name suggestion tools on the web and how you can use these services to find creative domain names
1. Bust A Name
Bust a Name offers an intuitive way to find creative domain names. Just type in the words that you prefer to have in your domain name and the tool finds you all the available domain names using the keywords of your choice.
You can also edit other settings like adding suffix, prefix or pluralize nouns. The listed domain name extensions are .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz. The app also shows options for domain names that are there for sale on the resale (Afternic) marketplace.
The good thing regarding the tool is that there are a wide range of options e.g checking with a hyphen, pluralizing the nouns, dropping the last vowel from any words and so on. The panel on the far right allows you to temporarily save a domain name which you may want to review later. No registration or signups are required to use the service.
2. Domainr – Find peculiar Domain Names
This is one of the best tools to find peculiar domain names which resemble the structure of a URL shortening service. Just type in any word and Domainr will put a dot in the middle of the characters, thus suggesting domain names with uncommon TLD’s.
If you are looking a way to get a domain name that matches your name or a short URL, Domainr is the best place to search for it. The site also has a neat iPhone app for the domain name finder.
3. Domize
Domize is also a yet another great tool to find out available domain names based on your search. The search results are shown instantly, as soon as you type.
Using Domize you can look out if an domain name was registered before or is available for a resale. You can also set the default domain registrar, so if you click the buy link you will be redirected directly to the registrar website.
4. Domain Typer
Domain Typer shows the domain availability as you type a hint for the domain name search. The domain name is searched for three most popularly used domain extensions.
Although you can add more extensions to the search, TLD (Top Level Domain) names are also shown as alternative suggestions. Domain name registrars like Godaddy, Netfirms are listed with the domain name prices. The site does a good job in showing shirt domain names, similar to Domainr (discussed earlier)
The advantage of Domain Typer over other domain name suggestion websites is that their price approximation is fairly accurate.
5. Dot-O-Mator
Dot-O-Mator performs exactly like the previous one. So you add your prefix and suffix choices and combine them to get probable names, select some (or all of them) from the combination to check their availability using Dotster. One added advantage for this tool is that you can use the Web 2.0 Domain name Generator to get random suggestions for domain names.
The list of domain name suggestion tools is possibly endless but we hope the above list will be useful, when you are trying to find a unique domain name for your online venture. Do check out these tools and let our fellow readers know any better alternatives through the comment section.
This article was first published on Jan 2011 and was updated in Nov 2018.
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