Domain Names Today and Beyond

The Direction of Domain Names Today and Beyond

The Direction of Domain Names Today and Beyond

By John Edet

The first ever .com domain name was purchased way back in 1985 and many other domains were purchased by large companies in the late 1990s. As the Internet became even more accessible to regular consumers, even personal people saw the need to have their own domain so they can easily promote their uploaded web page to other people in the future. Getting a new domain should be pretty easy these days considering all of the different web hosts and domain dealers offering domains at highly affordable prices. If you have the budget and website ready to go, you should get a domain name as soon as possible because of the direction hosting is going nowadays.

Cybersquatting and Typosquatting

Celebrities and cultures are on the rise all over the world and cybersquatters are trying to take advantage by purchasing as many domains as they can think of, and offering them to these celebrities for a very high price. Others may go the typosquatting route if they are unsuccessful in netting a domain which involves purchasing domain names that have typographical errors, in order to lure people that make mistakes in typing an address. This is a fairly big issue considering all of the companies that are on the rise who may have similar brand names.

Creative Domain Construction

In addition to cybersquatting, there are simply far too many domain names being registered these days. Some people hope to use them for SEO purposes, while others want their online business opportunities to be more recognized; others may even acquire domains that look tempting for running their scam websites. With these issues, people who are hoping to come up with a nice website need to add some creativity to their domain names. One bold example of such a move is the rise of image hosting site Flickr. Flickr started out small until they were acquired by Yahoo! and are now one of the most popular image hosting sites; they became so popular that other people started to get domain names that had the letter “R” in the end without a vowel preceding it.

Another modern technique is the creative usage of combining a sub-domain, domain name, and top-level domain. These are known as domain hacks and they started to become popular when social bookmarking site Delicious opened to the public and got purchased by Yahoo!; Country code domains like.am,.ly, and.us are usually used to craft a memorable domain hack. Even Google recently launched a URL shortener that makes use of a domain hack. With many domains being taken, it is expected for domain hacks to be used more often in the future.