Domain Name Generator

What the domain name generator does

You need a domain. For a company, a project, a thing you have been meaning to build for two years.

This gives you domain names to work from. Pull a batch and start crossing things out.

And before you go and register one, there is something about domains that most people who own several have still never quite absorbed, and it is worth four minutes of your life.

How to use it

Ask for a lot, because naming is a numbers game. Tap Generate for a new set, then Copy to take them somewhere you can check what is free.

You do not own a domain, and neither does anybody else

Ask somebody what they paid for their domain and they will tell you. Ask them what they bought and it gets vague.

Here is the answer. Nothing. You did not buy anything.

A domain is not a thing. There is no object anywhere. It is a row in a database, and the row says: when somebody asks for this name, send them to this address. That is the entire product. A pointer, in somebody else's ledger.

And you did not buy the row. You rented it. Usually for a year. When the year ends, if you do not pay again, the row goes back on the shelf and the next person can have it, and your name, your email addresses, your links, and everything anybody ever bookmarked belongs to them.

There is no deed. There is no title. There is nothing you could take to a court and wave, in the way you could with a house or a trademark. There is a registry, and there is an agreement, and your name is in it for as long as you keep paying and keep to the rules.

This sounds like a technicality until the year somebody forgets. Businesses have lost their domain to an expired card on a forgotten account. The site goes dark, the email stops arriving, and by the time anyone notices, the name has been picked up by somebody who watches for exactly that.

So a domain is closer to a phone number than a plot of land. It is a name you get to answer to, on the condition that you keep answering.

The first one, and what happened to it

The first .com was registered on the 15th of March, 1985.

It was symbolics.com. Symbolics Inc, out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, spun out of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. They built Lisp machines, which were single purpose computers made to run one programming language extremely well, and which were more or less the first workstations before that word existed. Their software was used on Star Trek III.

Registering it was not a land grab. There was nothing to grab. This was four years before anybody posted a web page. There was no browser, no web, no shopping, no search. There was no GoDaddy either, obviously. To get a domain you emailed a template to the Network Information Center at Stanford Research Institute, who were running the thing on behalf of DARPA, and you waited. Days. Maybe weeks. You might get told no.

Six companies bothered in all of 1985. Symbolics was simply first through the door.

Then here is my favourite bit of pacing in the whole history of the internet. The first hundred .com domains took until November 1987. Two and a half years to give away a hundred names. Nobody wanted them. There was no reason to want them.

And Symbolics?

Lisp machines stopped selling. The management went badly wrong, the leases were too big, the layoffs came. The company that registered the first .com in history went under, and in 2009 the domain was sold to a domain investor.

The oldest .com on earth is not owned by the people who made it. It is a collector's item, held by somebody who buys and sells names. Symbolics, what is left of it, sits at a different address entirely.

If you want the whole argument of the section above compressed into one fact: the very first company to ever register a dot com does not have it any more.

Why every good one is gone

A hundred names in two and a half years. And then the internet happened.

Now there are well over a hundred million .com domains. Not websites. Names. Most of them are not a business and never were. A large slice has never had anything on it at all.

Which is why the name you want is taken, and why the person who has it is not using it. Those are the same sentence. Domains got cheap enough and easy enough that registering them stopped being a decision, and people started collecting them the way you might collect anything else that costs almost nothing and might be worth something later.

Now do the arithmetic on the English language. How many words are short, spellable out loud, and pleasant? A few thousand. Add the obvious pairs of them and you get into the tens of thousands, maybe. That is the whole supply, and it was exhausted a long time ago by people who were paying about the price of a sandwich per name per year.

So look at a modern company. Spotify. Zalando. Kajabi. Twilio. Xero. Klarna.

Everyone assumes this is a branding fashion. It is not. It is a shortage. Those names are invented because there was nothing left to be called. A whole generation of companies has names that sound like that because of a decision somebody made in 1994 about the price of a domain.

The naming style of the modern internet is a fossil of its own scarcity.

Taking a domain name apart

Take one off the list. InnovateHub.com.

Read it right to left, because that is the direction it is actually organised in, and almost nobody knows that.

.com is the top level domain, and it sits at the top of the tree. It is one of the originals, from that 1985 batch, alongside .org, .net, .edu, .gov and .mil. It was supposed to mean commercial. It has meant nothing in particular for about thirty years.

innovatehub is the part you rent. This is the only bit that is yours, and it is the only bit anybody types on purpose.

And there is technically a dot on the end. A real one. The full name is innovatehub.com. with a trailing dot, which marks the root of the whole system. Your browser puts it there for you and hides it. Every domain on earth is a branch hanging off a dot that nobody has ever seen.

Now the practical half. That name is two English words with the seam showing, and that is the standard modern shape for a reason. You can say it on a phone. You can spell it once. A stranger can get it right without a hyphen or a number or a story.

The capital letters do nothing, by the way. Domains do not have case. InnovateHub.com and innovatehub.com are the same row in the same database. The capital is a reading aid for humans, which is exactly why you should use it on a business card and never rely on it anywhere else.

How these were put together

Nothing clever, and that is on purpose.

Each one was picked by hand, for the things that actually matter: can you say it, can you spell it, does it survive being read out over a bad phone line. Generate gives you a random pull, and no item repeats within one batch.

We are not bolting two word lists together to manufacture a big number. That gives you thousands of names, and you have to read all of them to find out that most are unusable.

All of it happens on your own device, and nothing leaves it.

Before you register anything

The radio test. Say it to somebody out loud, once, and watch them try to type it. Not read it to them letter by letter. Say it like you would on a phone. If they get it wrong, you have found a tax you will pay every day for years.

Read it as one word with no gaps. This is the classic and it is still funny. The capitals disappear the moment it becomes a link. Whatever is left has to still be the thing you meant. Say it out loud with the seam closed up and listen properly.

Do not solve a taken name with a hyphen or a number. You will spend the rest of your life saying "with a dash" and half your traffic will go to the person who has the real one. If it is taken, it is taken. Generate again.

Check the trademark, not just the availability. A domain being free tells you nothing about whether you are allowed to use it. Registrars sell names, they do not check anybody's rights, and a registrar taking your money is not permission. This is the step people skip and then meet a lawyer about.

Set it to auto renew and put a real card on it. Then put a reminder in a calendar anyway. Given everything above, this is the whole ballgame. The name is yours while you are paying and not one day longer.

Lock it. Registrar lock, two factor on the account, and an email address that is not itself at that domain. That last one has bitten real companies: the domain lapses, so the email stops, so the warning about the domain lapsing cannot reach you.

None of this is legal advice and we are not lawyers. It is the shape of the problem, so you know what to ask somebody who is.

Questions people ask

Do I own my domain?

No. You have the exclusive right to use a name for a period, from a registry, under an agreement. When the period ends, so does the right. It is a lease, and it is a short one.

The name I want is taken and the site is empty. Now what?

That is the normal state of affairs. Most registered domains have nothing on them. You can try to buy it, and you will find the price has very little to do with what it is worth and quite a lot to do with what the holder thinks you are worth. Most of the time the answer is to pick a different name.

Does it have to be .com?

No, and plenty of good companies are not. But be honest about the cost. A meaningful share of people will type .com no matter what you told them, because thirty years of habit is stronger than your business card. If you go elsewhere, buy the .com too if you possibly can, even if it only ever redirects.

Can I buy one forever?

No. There is no forever. You can pay for up to ten years at a time with most registrars, which is the closest thing on offer, and then you pay again.

Do capital letters matter?

Not to the computer. Domains have no case, so InnovateHub.com and innovatehub.com are identical. Use the capitals for humans reading a poster and never depend on them for anything else.

References

1. 1st .com domain name is registered, March 15, 1985. EDN. https://www.edn.com/1st-com-domain-name-is-registered-march-15-1985/
2. 25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands. TechCrunch, 27 August 2009. https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/27/25-years-later-first-registered-domain-name-changes-hands/
3. Symbolics.com is the first registered .com domain name. Stackscale. https://www.stackscale.com/blog/symbolics-com-domain-name/
4. List of the oldest currently registered Internet domain names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently-registered_Internet_domain_names