Good Domain Names Are Squatted or Priced Out of Reach
Founders and businesses face significant hurdles in acquiring and managing suitable domain names. This includes dealing with squatting, inflated pricing for desirable names, competition for similar names, and the challenges of establishing online presence for established companies that missed the initial domain registration window. The core pain is the difficulty and cost associated with owning a relevant and valuable online identity.
SOURCES (60)
“I am having a great time starting my new store. But one thing has been the most difficult thing for me, coming up with a brand name. I have tried working with AI but they all sound pretty gimmicky or obvious drop-shipped names. We have…”
“Even if that’s not the main brand it can be used as a secondary domain to forward. Ha if it was cheaper I’d buy it shoot. Haha”
“I have acquired the domain saadraja.is a.dev and connect the vercel. but when I navigate to it. the website do not open. is this the some kind of issue with dns or what?”
“I'm looking at buying a used domain. The seller shows DR and backlinks. But I keep thinking that's not enough. What do you check before you pay? Any red flags that made you walk away? submitted by /u/Significant-Watch556 [link] [comments]”
“Hi guys im new to the business world .. im starting with digital products domain … i already started a first niche and it was a complete failure (tested for 5 days ) and now im on my second niche … the niche has more demand than the first one … so i created social media account to promote it (all of them are 0 views till now ) the question is : how much time did it take you to make ur first sale ? submitted by /u/Consistent_Offer_739 [link] [comments]”
“I’m a rare book dealer with a well-functioning Shopify website, but I am thinking of a name rebrand as people often spell the site incorrectly or mispronounce it with the current name being “Uncial”. As it’s not finalized, I’m going to use an example name in place of the one I’m considering: “future” (although it’s way less generic, but still simply spelled and understood. Additionally I’ve looked up trademarks and other name ownerships, and it’s quite available legally). Future.com and FutureBo”
“Problem with custom website is that it requires more effort, then there's also the issue of domain availability like if the name you want from a popular domain is already taken, you have to compromise and settle with something else that could serve as an alternative like .shop for business which can still be decent.”
“With such tool, are people not concerned that the tool maker could squat/front run the best names themselves? Any re-assurances against that?”
“I have found (i think) a better way to go about naming startup or projects, including the dilemma of picking domain. Basically don’t buy any domain initially. Have a single generic company domain and start your startup as a subdir (/) of that domain. Treat it as a sub-brand, otr just a product. Use any brand-able name, and if domain is available then sure buy the .com for that. This way any SEO juice you build will be at least permanent and would benefit your company brand. Then if the project g”
“I've been thinking about how easy it is to make an expired domain look good on paper. You can find one with: decent authority metrics hundreds of referring domains an old creation date archived pages going back years apparently relevant backlinks and still be buying something you probably shouldn't touch. The more expired domains I look at, the less comfortable I am treating any single metric as a quality signal. Backlinks are probably the clearest example. 300 referring domains sounds b”
“Is it a dot com? You mention 2 words, but it really depends on a lot of the two words. One word domains are obviously worth way more, but 2 words can still be valuable - especially if they feel suitable for a commercial site.”
“Thanks for the advice but I suspect they’ll make a real lowball offer. They have been building a business based on the name for years and said they were about to trademark it…. But hit the hurdle of me!”
“ChatGPT priced it, not the market. A domain is worth what this particular buyer will pay. They came to you, so I'd let them make the first offer. My rule: never name a number first in these negotiations.”
“It really depends on the domain. It’s hard to give a value without knowing what it is.”
“the domain alone might be worth something if its a good name but without any revenue or even a single customer it feels like selling a car with no engine, you got the frame and paint but its not going anywhere. maybe option A if someone is feeling generous”
“I own a URL and trademark which I was planning to use for a business, however put it on hold for various reasons. I have randomly been approached by someone who really wants the URL. I said I can sell to them but I’m unsure how to place a value on it. Is there a rule of thumb? ChatGPT suggests 7.5-12k but that seems a bit greedy to me. Would love your thoughts. Thanks.🙏 submitted by /u/AussieChix [link] [comments]”
“were these all generated with the same model and prompt style? i’d be curious how much the results change with a different generator. if the model keeps suggesting the same startup-sounding names everyone else gets, that could explain part of the SaaS/consultancy gap. would also be useful to include the fully taken names in the CSV so people can look for those patterns.”
“There is an entire aftermarket for domains, you don't need to settle for what is available to register.”
“FWIW a lot of the big names like Google, Apple, and Microsoft moved to a single domain from many fragmented subdomains because it makes life easier for a lot of reasons you probably don't care about for fantasy football, but it's the way it's done now. Edit: security, SEO, cookies, tracking, etc”
“That's true and all, but are by far the most scarce in availability and prepare to get gouged if you need to buy the .com domain you actually want. I found out that my own same + .com is taken and I don't have a common name or spelling. Some company in asia just bought it and has it sitting parked collecting minuscule ad revenue while they wait for somebody like me to get desperate to buy it. You can basically forget about trying to get any sort of catchy sounding name or generalized .co”
“In my opinion, having separate subdomains would be better, as it would allow us to manage them more efficiently...”
“Why it makes sense: xyz.com has the landing/marketing page. You can use a CMS to make your life easier. Then the app.xyz.com has the actual app.”
“One advantage of having an app domain is that it separates your traffic between your marketing site and app site by DNS, which makes configuration simpler if you find you need to do different things with your app. My personal advice is this: Do you care if the app has a different subdomain? If not, then have it on a different subdomain. Then if you need to do something in the future, it's likely going to be simpler. If it's important to you to have it on the same subdomain then do that.”
“The one real cost of a subdomain is that logging a user gets trickier, since your marketing site and app are different websites and need extra work to share who’s logged in, keeping everything on one domain avoids that.”
“I’m finding a lot of mixed advice on what to do here. I’m creating a fantasy football app and can’t decide if I should have a subdomain. AI and a few Reddit post are telling me you need to have your XYZ.com be your marketing page and app.XYZ.com be your app. But the following big names do not: Sleeper AirTable Figma Canva Trello Dropbox Github This is something that will be difficult to change later, so I wanna make sure I make the right call. Anybody have any good insight here? submitted”
“Depends on what your ultimate goals are. Having a bad TLD impacts discoverability, deliverability, and overall reputation. And if you get successful, acquiring the good TLD later gets a lot more expensive.”
“It’s not just “the more startup” it sounds the more likely it is to be taken. If your name is a words in any of the major languages plus a prefix or a suffix or a play with letters, it’s likely to have been used already.”
“Wait, like Federal Express turning into FedEx? If that's what you mean? How do you actually land on something like that?”
“Once you've got a word that actually means something, how do you go from there to an actual domain?”
“Mostly I look at the industry I’m building in and brainstorm a 5–6 letter name for the company that correlates with that industry (which yields low results but is worth a try) and sometimes I just shorten the full company name into pronounceable names that are also valid names.”
“45.7% of 19k with nothing open anywhere is grim, but that's what happens when every generator pulls from the same pool of names. The category numbers are a bit misleading too, bakeries aren't easier to name, they just get named after the owner or the street. My trick is to start from a word that actually means something to you and only then check availability, instead of picking from a list.”
“I am not sure that there is a payoff for this effort. It depends a ton on what you actually searched for and that a lot of great domain names are already taken is news from a long time ago. This however does not mean one can not find a domain name for their project.”
“I generated 19,237 AI business names across 10 business types (bakery, law firm, saas, gym,salon, etc) and checked every one live against .com/.io/.ai/.co, 76,948 domain checks total. Nearly half of them, 45.7%, had nothing open anywhere on any extension. Of what's left, .com is 86% taken, .co 57%, .ai 51%, .io 51%. Percent taken on every extension by category: consultancy 64%, saas 63%, photography 55%, gym 54%, law firm 48%, salon 45%, coffee shop 40%, landscaping 38%, bakery 32%, pet groo”
“domain age is usually the single biggest signal those checkers weigh, and if you're on WHOIS privacy that alone flags you as anonymous even with everything else done right. worth checking if your WHOIS is public with the sole trader name/address showing, some of these scoring bots treat privacy protection as a red flag on its own regardless of what's on the site itself.”
“We have 2 companies; a parent company and a child company. Both have separate on-prem AD domain controllers in their buildings. Parent company building is in Florida and child co is in Colorado. The parent company has a lot more infrastructure/systems that the child company will need access to. How would we go about migrating the child co AD (users/workstations) into the parent co so that they could continue to login with the child co domain and gain access into the parent co systems? Is this so”
I am building a SaaS product in a niche that is related to voxels (an art style for videogames) I am thinking of two names. I would love outside opinions. thevoxelmachine.com voxelful.com…
“Every generator I tried gave me a hundred great names, then I'd spend an hour finding out that most were taken. So I built one that checks availability live before showing you anything, names with nothing available get filtered out. A run is 200 live domain checks, in roughly 20 seconds. It's not instant because it's making real registrar calls rather than guessing. Defaults to .com/.io/.ai/.co, but you can put in whatever extensions you want. FastAPI + Claude for the generation. The”
“Love it! Found a domain I liked though and it was either not actually available, or successfully found through this tool and purchased in the last hour. haha”
“name generators are everywhere but the domain check in the same flow is the part that actually saves time. most people skip the generator step because then you have to go check availability separately anyway. if your suggestions are genuinely better than just typing random words into namecheap, you've got something useful.”
“I’m looking for some perspective from people who have done an MBA (US/Europe) or are currently pursuing one, especially those who came from a tech/SWE background. I’m currently at a MNC, background - Tier-1 Indian college background with ~5 years of experience in the IT industry. My bigger question is about career direction. I don’t see myself going deeper into pure engineering and have been increasingly interested in Product Management, product strategy, business strategy, etc. I don’t have a s”
“In the near future I'm aiming with our team to get a 2L-4L domain that would be cheaper + added fees for our agency customers & direct customers. Just asking around reddit getting straight bs”
“Even if the .shop is legit, if every other ending is taken, do you really want to me one of 20 with the same name?”
“Part of coming up with a name for a business is checking domain availability, trademarks, business name registration, and so on. It might be tempting to think "oh, the .com is unavailable so I'll choose a different extension" but you could be stepping onto someone else's turf with the name. Are you that invested in the name?”
“We recently got to the release point so we needed a domain and name (deliberately not mentioning name or product, don't want to promote). We picked the name early, the way you do, because it sounded right. It was cool, we liked it and that was reflecting nature of what we were making. .com domain wasn't available but that's not a big deal. A few days ago, we are at the poin of setting up everything to go-live so we start looking for domain options. It was the first time we actually s”
“I own a business with a .shop domain. Performance is good and it fits with my biz name. People will shop around and look you up, not just judge only on the domain extension. I'm surprised people here think it's shady as I never had an issue.”
“FWIW, a customer of mine runs an ecommerce on a .shop domain and it sells fine. Some domain name in certain fields leave little space for manoevre since the most obvious ones are already taken long ago.”
“The .com for my name is parked at four figures and every variation left is a misspelling people will most definitely get wrong. Ive been sitting on it for two weeks. Half of me thinks the extension doesnt even matter, but I also worry if a customer sees anything but .com theyll assume the site is sketchy. Hate that THIS is where I am getting stuck of all places submitted by /u/HATDOGUSERNi [link] [comments]”