Naming notes · Beginner · one evening
How to choose a domain name — Pick a Name You Can Type, Say and Grep
You will type this string a thousand times, paste it into DNS records and read it down a phone line, so optimise it for the keyboard and the terminal rather than the pitch deck.
The short answer
Choose the name that is cheapest to type, say and paste, because those are the operations you will perform on it several thousand times. Spend the evening on ambiguity and on trademark checks, not on cleverness.
The string is about to appear in a git remote, an SPF record, a DKIM selector, a TLS certificate, every email address on the team and the top of every invoice. Anything that makes a human ask 'how do you spell that?' becomes a support cost and a second domain with a redirect on it.
By the HostingFast team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
Beginner
Skill floor
5
Tests to apply
Free
Support, every tier
Proven
Run on the live stack
This one is judgement rather than configuration, so there is nothing to break. Set aside an evening, write candidates down on paper, and apply the five tests below before you open a search box.
The registration mechanics themselves take minutes once you have decided, and annual hosting plans here include the first year of the domain, so the decision costs more than the purchase does.
Every place the string is about to appear
Write the shortlist out as it will really be used: git@github.com:you/name.git, v=spf1 include:name.com, selector._domainkey.name.com, admin@name.com, the SAN list on the certificate, the analytics hostname filter. A name that is comfortable in a logo can be miserable in a terminal.
Two properties matter more than anything aesthetic. It must survive being lowercased, because hostnames are case-insensitive and half your team will type it that way. And it must survive being read aloud, because sooner or later someone will dictate it to a client over a bad line.
Five tests that kill a bad name in ten minutes
Say it into your own voicemail, then play it back and write down what you hear. Type it twenty times one-handed and count the corrections. Read the concatenation carefully, because joined words produce substrings nobody intended and the internet will find them before your customers do.
Then check the plural and the hyphenated variant. If either is a genuinely different business, you have picked a name that will need a defensive registration and a redirect for the rest of its life, which is a permanent hop on every mistyped visit.
Clearing trademarks and handles before you commit
Search the UK IPO and EUIPO registers for the exact string and the obvious near misses in the classes you will actually trade in. A domain does not grant you a right to a name, and discovering that after the signage is printed is an expensive way to learn it.
Check the same string on the platforms you will use, and check package registries too. A brand that collides with a well-known npm package or Docker image will spend years being ambiguous in exactly the search results your own developers use.
What you stop having to think about here
Order an annual plan and the first year of the registration costs nothing, SSL is issued and renewed without a request, and migration from your current host is done by our engineers rather than by you at the weekend.
Upgrades are an account change rather than a move, so picking a small plan today does not commit you to a migration when the name starts working. That keeps the naming decision reversible in every direction except the name itself.
Why the follow-through is quick here
Guides written against imaginary hosting go stale fast. These are written against the real thing: the same panel, the same installer, the same defaults sitting in your account when you log in.
NVMe storage sits behind a LiteSpeed cache on every tier including the smallest, so speed is the baseline rather than the upsell.
- Commands and field names quoted as they appear
- The failure mode named before you meet it
- Anything automatable already automated
- Engineers on support at any hour
Why HostingFast
Standard on every plan
Judged on real use
The tests below are the operations you will actually perform on the string: typing, saying, pasting into a DNS record.
Scoped honestly
This is an evening of thought rather than a configuration task, and the page says so instead of inventing steps.
The failure named early
Ambiguity is the expensive mistake, and it is named at the top rather than discovered after the signage is printed.
5 tests, no padding
Each test is something you can finish in two minutes, and any candidate that fails one is out.
Legal check included
The trademark and handle sweep is part of the sequence, not an afterthought bolted on at the end.
Engineers on call
Support answers at any hour, including the awkward practical questions about what a name will do to your mail setup.
Quick Start
From order to online
- 1
Say each candidate into your own voicemail
Record it, play it back and write down what you hear rather than what you said. If the playback and the spelling disagree, the name will disagree with your customers too. This test eliminates more candidates than any other.
- 2
Type it twenty times, one-handed
Count the corrections. Adjacent double letters, an l next to an i and anything with a silent letter all show up here. You are about to type this string into terminals and DNS panels for years, so a two per cent error rate is not free.
- 3
Read the concatenation out loud
Joined words create substrings their authors never saw. Read the whole string as one word, then have somebody who has not seen the shortlist do the same. This is a five-minute check that has saved entire rebrands.
- 4
Clear the registers and the handles
Search the UK IPO and EUIPO registers for the exact string and its near misses in your trading classes, then check the same string on the platforms you will use and on the package registries your developers search.
- 5
Sleep on the shortlist, then register the same day you decide
Names read differently after a night. Once one survives that, register it immediately and turn auto-renew on in the same session, because the gap between deciding and buying is where good names are lost.
Built In
Loaded onto every plan
- NVMe storage on every tier, not only the expensive ones
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox as standard
- Daily backups with self-service restores from the panel
- Per-site PHP version switching in the control panel
- Support staffed by humans, every hour of the day
- 99.9% uptime as the target, monitored around the clock
- Money back: 30 days on hosting, 7 on reseller
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
- A renewal price identical to the one you signed up at
- Free SSL on every plan, renewed before it can lapse
Frequently Asked
What people ask us most often
Do hyphens or digits cause any technical problems?
Nothing breaks technically. Hyphens are legal in hostnames and digits are fine, so DNS, TLS and mail are all indifferent. The cost is human: every hyphen is a thing to explain on the phone, and a digit invites the spelled-out variant to be registered by somebody else. If you use one, register the version without it and 301 it in a single hop.
Does a .dev or .app domain force HTTPS on me?
Yes, and that is a feature rather than a snag. Both TLDs are on the HSTS preload list at the registry level, so browsers refuse plain HTTP for every name under them before your server is even consulted. Pick one only if you are certain every host under the domain, including staging and any legacy tooling, can serve TLS.
Should the domain match the brand or the search term?
Match the brand. A term in the domain is a weak signal at best, and it locks you into one product description for the life of the business. The compounding asset is a name people can recall and type without help, because that is what turns into direct traffic and clean referral links over years.
Can I change the domain later without losing the site?
You can, and it is a known job rather than a disaster: stand the site up on the new name, rewrite internal references, publish a one-hop 301 map from every old URL to its new equivalent, then file the change with Google and hold the old registration. It is an afternoon of careful work, which is a strong argument for getting the name right the first time.
Keep reading
How to Stop Your Email Going to Spam
Get authenticated mail out of the door and past the filters, with the records that decide it.
How to Reset Your WordPress Password
Regain access from WP-CLI, phpMyAdmin or the panel when the reset email will not arrive.
Domain Name (Glossary)
The definition this page leans on, with the resolver path spelled out.
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