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How to choose a domain name
Most advice about choosing a domain is about what sounds good. The useful tests are about what survives being said out loud, typed from memory, and read by someone who has never heard of you.
The spelling test
Say the name to someone and ask them to type it. If they hesitate, the name has a spelling problem. The usual culprits are doubled letters, words that have two accepted spellings, numbers that could be digits or words, and hyphens, which almost nobody remembers.
This matters less than it used to. Most traffic arrives through a link, a search result, or an autocomplete suggestion, not through someone typing a name they heard once. Treat spelling as a real but secondary cost, and weigh it against how much of your traffic will ever come from speech.
Length is a proxy, not a rule
Short names are prized because they are easier to remember and to fit in a logo, not because search engines reward them. A longer name that says what it is beats a short one that says nothing. bulkdnslookup.com is worse than dnsly.com for branding and better for being understood at a glance; which matters more depends on whether you are building a brand or a utility.
Check the trademark before you fall in love
Registering a domain gives you no rights to the name. A trademark holder can take it through a UDRP dispute even if you registered first and paid every year. Before committing, search the relevant trademark registers for your country and for the countries you sell into, and search the plain name to see who already uses it commercially — a WHOIS lookup on the domain itself shows which registrar holds it and when it was first registered, which is usually enough to tell a parked name from a live business.
An ordinary word used in an unrelated field is usually safe. A word that is a known brand in your own field is not, no matter how generic it looks.
The ending changes the meaning
A newer ending can carry information the name does not have to, and most of what an ending signals is convention rather than rule — .com vs .net vs .org sets out what each of the three implies, and which endings come with real eligibility rules. The tradeoff is that some people still type .com out of habit, and a few old forms and validators reject endings longer than three characters. Neither is fatal; both are real.
Check the renewal price, not the first year
A domain is a subscription. The first-year price is a marketing number and the renewal is what you actually pay, every year, for as long as the project lives. Missing one costs more than paying it: what happens after a domain expires is a grace period, then redemption, where getting the name back costs the renewal plus a registry fee. Our own rate card shows the gap plainly: .xyz is $3.99 to register and $17.99 to renew. That is a fine deal if you know about it in advance and a nasty surprise if you do not.
Before you buy
Read the name with no spaces and look for an accidental second word. Search it and see what already ranks. Check whether the matching handles exist on the networks you care about. Then check the renewal price one more time. If two or three candidates are still standing, run them through the bulk availability checker together rather than testing them one at a time.
If nothing on the shortlist survives these tests, go back to the keyword rather than to the name: our domain name generator turns a word or two into candidates across endings, each checked for availability and shown with its renewal price as well as its first year.