Why Domains?
Background
The Internet is made from countless Internet protocol (IP) address. These are unique strings of four numbers separated by periods (for example: 157.166.226.25). Since nobody can remember IP addresses a system was developed (know as DNS since its invention in 1983) in order to assign a unique name to each numeric IP address.
So why are domain names important?
Here is a non exhaustive list:
1. Since a (unique) IP has its own unique domain name there can only be one CNN.com and one Wikipedia.org. This means that two companies with the same name in the “real
world” will need two different domain names on the web.
2. Since many people still memorize their favorite website addresses (instead of using bookmarks, search engines etc.) its important to have a domain that people can
remember. What names do people tend to remember? short, meaningful and easy to spell. Lets go over them one by one.
- Short - There are 26 letters and 10 digits which can be used to create a one character domains. Even if you consider relatively recent TLDs such as .museum, we are talking about several hundred domain names which are probably all taken by now (interestingly the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority reserved most of the one character domain names, although some have been released such as x.com). Two later domains are also sold out by now (especially .com ones), although some are auctioned from time to time (there are only 1296 combination including numbers) . In the mid 2000’s it was still possible to find a 3 character domain (out of almost 48,000 per extension). Today 3 character .com domains are mostly sold out although it is possible to still find some on auctions. Since there are over 1.7 million 4 character domains (per extension) its not inconceivable that there are still a few available (especially with numbers). At the end of the day although a short domains are typically better having a meaningful domain name might be even more important (what do you find easier to remember sdjk.com or bestbuy.com).
- Meaningful – Since most of us already remember many English words (even many non-English speakers), using them as domain names seem fairly obvious. For example, although technologyreview.com has 17 characters it is still fairly memorable. Of course worldscheapesttravelaccessories.com might be meaningful but it could hardly be considered a good domain name. One more thing to consider is typing and spelling errors which are more frequent in longer domain names. Which probably means that even if you can use up to 63 characters in your domain name, you should probably stick to something substintially shorter.
- Easy to spell – spelling problems really isn’t restricted to people with leaning disabilities and non native English speakers. You don’t even need to go as far as perseverance, even simpler words are often misspelled. When choosing a domain name its worth thinking about some of the mistakes people can make while writing it (some people simply buy close misspelled domains to protect their original domain, others buy them to make “easy” traffic from misspelling). Although using numbers instead of words might be shorter (and some people could consider it “cool”) it is actually prone to mistakes (”did you mean send6.com or sendsix.com?”). The same goes with hyphens. Although they might help distinguish between long words people often forget to use them and could simply end up on the wrong website.
3. Domain names are also important because they represent who you are. For that reason companies are sometimes willing to spend thousands of dollars to acquire a domain
with their name. More and more companies are actually choosing their name based on free (or at least available) domains, something which is not true any more only for
internet companies.
At the end of the day good domain names are a resource, not very different than gas or gold. Although new extensions are added every now and than .com are still the most popular by far and good .com domains nowadays are becoming almost as rare as pure gold.
