Okay, you've chosen your hosting, and you need a domain. You have a general idea of what you want the site to be, so you're probably thinking of domains. This is harder than it sounds, as the good domains are taken. If you're running an Admin forum for example, you don't want to be running under "myawesomesite.com", you want a domain such as AdminForums.com or something which is related. Always consider though that having the word forums in the domain limits the scope of what the site can become in the future, should you not decide to continue with your forum idea. You also need to make sure you choose a memorable domain. Something such as weareaforumforcommunityadminswetalkaboutadminissues.com - Short, snappy and a good ring to it. AdminExtra for example chose a prime domain. Make sure you have a short domain.
Very true. Keep the domain name short and memorable. Also avoid ambiguous names. As for the choice of a single-purpose domain name, no need to do it if you can host subdomains with redirects. concen.org is split into a forum and tracker. I just divide the parts into their own subdirectories and have redirects from subdomains. tracker.concen.org becomes concen.org/tracker etc. One of my domains, foscore.com, is often hard for me to spell out over the phone because they think I'm saying "foxcore.com". I'll choose more wisely next time. I registerd jointhecrowd.net even though jointhecrowd.com had been taken. Only months later, jointhecrowd.ca was also taken. Since I'm Canadian and want to have clear corporate ownership of the name, this was untenable. I was boxed in. So I did the wise thing and cut my losses, registering thesamecrowd.com, thesamecrowd.net. thesamecrowd.org, and thesamecrowd.ca. I even got sucked into registering thesamecrowd.co. Maybe if I want to translate the site into Spanish I'll have some volunteers... Also, if you plan to register and do your own hosting, don't get sucked into the higher priced registrars like register.com - especially if you know DNS. Just some additional thoughts from my experience...
I'm currently having some issues picking a domain name for my forum. Every time I finally settle on a domain I go to buy it and its a premium domain so its like 2 grand...
I know I had a heck of a time figuring out a domain that I thought would be good and available. settled on parrotloversforum.com
I just wish i had put more thought into my domain, I have lab-lovers.com but think i may have got better ranking using some thing like labrador forum.
I wanted the words "Off Topic" in my forum URL, I settled on Off Topic Hut, resulting in offtopichut.com A week later I thought of offtopictalk.com - it was free, I bought it but still have not used it, I like the hut better
