kintoesti.com · Guides

How to choose a good domain name (and find it free)

The Bureau’s practical rules: length, the radio test, hyphens, trademarks — pick a name you will not regret in five years.

Short beats clever

Under fifteen characters, a name fits on a business card, in an email address and in a human memory. Every extra character is one more chance for a typo — and typos send your visitors to somebody else’s website. When in doubt, cut.

Pass the radio test

Say your candidate out loud to a friend, then ask them to type it. If they pause — was there a hyphen? a double “n”? a digit? — the name will leak visitors forever, one mishearing at a time. Names that survive the radio test are worth gold.

Hyphens and digits: handle with care

Hyphens are perfectly legal in the DNS, and sometimes they rescue an unreadable pair of words. But they are memory-hostile: people forget them, and the un-hyphenated version usually belongs to someone else. Digits are worse — is it “4” or “four”? Keep them for the rare cases where the joined form is genuinely ambiguous.

Think in years, not in trends

A pun that is hilarious today can feel dated in two years. Before you fall in love, run three checks: pronounce it with your worst accent, search the exact phrase to see who else uses it, and look for trademark collisions in your market. Ten minutes of caution beat an expensive rename.

Fall in love — then verify

Order matters: generate freely, shortlist with your heart, verify with the registries. The Bureau’s generator drafts combinations, portmanteaus and initials with live availability — tap the heart on the survivors, sleep on it, and register your winner in the morning.

Guides from the Bureau