The End of .Com Within Domain Name Registrations
A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Nuno Rolinho
What Do You Get When You Apply for a New Domain Name Registration?
When you apply for a new domain name registration you usually get the name for your website, that is, the name that will substitute the IP number of your webpage.
The name for this website should start with the common "www.", then your name comes after and finally you can choose a generic domain, a country level domain or an alternative domain. Besides the name for the website, some domain name registration services offer a wide range of customizable options, such as: web-based control panels, email and website forwarding or even a sample and under construction page.
The End of .Com Within Domain Name Registrations
There are several alternatives for a ".com" Domain Name Registration. The estimated number of websites in the world wide web is 63 Million, that is something like 1 domain name for each habitant of this planet. This boom of domain name registrations was even bigger with the recent availability of Arabic, Russian and Chinese characters within domain names.
The major part of these domains have the ".com" extension, and nowadays finding a good and catchy domain name with ".com" extension is an hard mission. This is why more extensions were created by the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers); ".biz" and ".info" are two of those new extensions.
Alternatives for a ".Com" Domain Name Registration
" biz" and ".info" were new extensions created in 2004 and more than 2 million of domain names were registered within the first few hours. Although it doesn't sound as good as ".com", these new domains are the new alternatives to already registered ".com" domain names, some of these domains are not even activated, just waiting for a good financial proposal. Older extensions like ".net", ".tv", ".org" are also alternatives for a ".com" extension.
Governments of the whole world agreed with the creation of domain names for specific situations: for example ".gov" for US Governmental Institutions ".eu" or ".int" for European Union organizations or the countries own extensions (i.e. ".co.uk", ".fr", ".es", ".au", ".ru", etc).
Creative Ways of Finding an Available ".Com" Domain Name
Imagine that you are about to create your own cow meat website. You decide to create the "cowmeat.com" website, but that one is already taken. You try "cow-meat.com" but unfortunately that one is already taken too. A creative way of skirting this situation is playing with phonetics. You can try different variations of the words you want to use: "kow" for "cow", "mit" for "meat" or even play with the sound that a cow does; something like "mu-mu-meat.com".
These are just creative ways of getting a ".com" domain name since everything's pretty taken by now, whenever you want to open your bar or starting your own business, think that you might want to develop a website for that. So before registering the name for that business check the internet for possible domain names.
