With Dot Com's Nearly All Taken, What's Next?

Countless times I've found myself struggling to find the perfect name for a new site idea that I've been putting. Variation after variation leads me to realize that it may just be impossible to get a short and straight forward name with a dot com ending because someone has already beaten me to it. Registration sites love to offer you all of the alternative names that they have available, but when it comes down to it, adding a number of more unnecessary characters to the url can be more harm then it's worth. But as the web is expanding, more domain options have come to light and are readily available for purchase. But just like dot com and even dot net, if you don't act on it fast, you'll lose your shot at it.

In the days when www was mandatory, any site with a domain other than dot com often found themselves ignored by websurfers. Today, all that matters his how specific to your keywords the domain name is so that you can take advantage of that for search engine optimization. So these new domains actually have a fair amount of strength in comparison to abandoning your desired site name to simply have a dot com.

My most recent project actually lead me to a series of dot ws domains. All of the sites I came across has really high quality names and had excellent designs as well so I figured learning more about dot ws would be worthwhile. It turns out that dot ws refers to website and those unique designs I had come across were actually templates. What really caught my interest was that the services they offered didn't end there either!

Pulling up the products page on website.ws, the main distribution site for all dot ws domains, I was startled to find the plethora of options that they provided to their customers. Dot ws domains all appeared to include completely free hosting services, free ftp services, free url forwarding, free e-mail accounts, free SiteBuilder design, and even free technical support. I laughed as I searched for the price for all of these services as several of the hosting services I was considering using for my dot com site didn't even provide me with free e-mail addresses but as I stumbled upon the price I had to do a double take.

Somehow, website.ws has managed to offer all of these services for $10 a month, including the domain name. The lowest I could even find to compete with everything they could offer would have cost me $110 a year and that's without tools such as SiteBuilder! So for $10 more I wouldn't have to compromise with the name just to get an unfriendly dot com provider with no design help at all. If I would have purchased a dot com and hosted it myself, it would still most likely show an empty page as I am personally not the best designer and I don't currently have one that I go to. But with a dot ws domain, I would easily be able to get a fully function site up and host on the same day that I purchased it and set it up.

If you're a tech savvy individual and have somehow lucked out and landed a dot com domain name that actually identifies your site properly, you'll probably want to pass on dot ws at this point. But for everyone else, or for those who are just too tired of waiting for their site to get finished by an out sourced designer or are sick of having to deal with separate DNS and domain registration companies, you'll find this solution a lot simpler. Personally, the ability it gives me to grow with it and bring the domain with me as I expand my hosting knowledge is really welcoming in comparison to some of the gimmicks I've run across in other non dot coms before.

What sells your site is the name and the content on it, not the domain. WWW is being phased out of urls and dot coms are nearly full. Making the move and getting the name you want is the most important aspect of site registration that you will encounter.