What's in a name?

The hardest part of setting up a web server can be selecting a domain name (yes it can be even worse than reading about LAMP servers!). The problem arises because names need to work for your website and product, they need to be catchy to remember and they need to be unique. It's the latter that presents the biggest problem with over 180M websites how do you make yours stand out? The other component of this problem is that every word in most of the dictionaries in the world have already been registered by someone else, most of the surnames in the world are registered and lots of short made-up 4-6 character words have been registered. Now can you get someone to type www.theworldsbestchocolatechipcookies.com (yes, it's available), but it would take some work to make the name a success. If you're a UK business then the .co.uk address space is slightly less cluttered, but it can still be difficult. I got fed up with our governments obsession with giving everybody access to our web mail and browser history in the name of national security so in a moment of anger I set up a domain leuteria.com (by Wednesday evening it might have a home page). Leuteria is the English spelling of a Greek word meaning freedom; but I spent an evening going through all the English and Latin words in the thesaurus relating to liberty to find them all taken. The challenge is that we live in a world of brands and so if you want to put a business on the web you need to choose a name and build a brand around it -extreme creativity may be called for.