Getting a domain name is cheap and easy. The information on this page will help you to pick a good domain name for your site.

Domain Name Checker

What is a Domain Name?

A Domain Name is a unique name for your website on the Internet. The domain name for this site is gizagoo.com. People can access your site by typing www. (world wide web) followed by the domain name into the address bar of a browser. Most sites can also be accessed when the www is omitted.

A domain name is intended to be something that can be remembered easily by humans, instead of having to remember a sequence of numbers to identify a particular computer.

The last part of the domain name is the TLD, or top-level domain. The most popular, by far, is the .com. Originally intended for commercial sites, the .com became the TLD of choice for most websites. If you just type a domain name into the address bar of a browser and press Ctrl-Enter, most browsers will add the www. at the beginning and .com at the end and go directly to the site.

Other popular TLDs include .net, .org, .biz, .info, .mobi, .me and .tv. Most of these are perceived as being global and not associated with a country or region. Others such as .ie, .co.uk, and .eu are tied to a region and sometimes require the person registering to prove they live or trade in that area.

The following table gives a list of some of the more popular TLDs.

You make up the part that goes before the TLD. It can be up to 64 characters and can contain letters, numbers or hyphens. Hyphens cannot be at the beginning or the end and other characters including spaces are not allowed. You will need to check that the name you select is not already allocated to someone else.

Choosing a Good Name

Make it easy to remember. If someone finds themselves on your site by accident, they have to be able to remember your domain name if they want to find it again.

Keep it short. Shorter names are easier to remember than long ones. Many well known sites have less than 10 characters. Think of Google, EBay, Twitter and Facebook to name but a few. That is much better than thebestsearchengine.com in our opinion.

Use correct spelling of simple words. Generally it is better to join simple words together like face and book to get facebook. This is better than using FaceBuk or CountenanceTome. However, we used Gizagoo instead of GiveUsAGoo.

Use a meaningful name. If you have a company name or trading name already, try to use that. If you are creating one, try to pick a name that will mean something to visitors to your website. That said, Google and EBay seem to do fine. Search engines take the domain name into account, so if you want to attract people searching for widgets, then try to get a domain name with widgets as part of the domain name.

Use an appropriate top-level domain (TLD). If you are selling primarily to an Irish market, then the .ie is probably more impressive than a .com, and will identify you as Irish immediately.

Where do I get one?

There are many domain name sellers and prices can vary considerably depending on the top-level domain you want to buy. Make sure that you get full DNS control so that you can direct the domain name to your website. We sell domain names, with full DNS control on our shopping site at shop.gizagoo.com. Our yearly rates are as follows:

We do not provide an automated purchase for .ie domains, as supporting documentation is required to prove business or name registration in Ireland, or trademarking. Please contact us directly for .ie domains.