There comes a time in the life of a nethead when it is necessary to take stock of your email and/or domain name. When you first get online, you take what you are given and don’t think too much about the ramifications of it. My first account was with Demon, the original £10 a month provider, when I was known as ian@i-grey.demon.co.uk, but then I moved to Pipex and I became ian.grey@dial.pipex.com, although originally I was the slightly less memorable fa34 until they introduced alias names.

It eventually occurred to me that these names locked me in: if I got fed up with the provider (and we all do) then I’d have to let everyone know the new email (& all the links on Usenet would be broken). So, I chose my first real domain- delicolor.co.uk. The trouble with that was how to spell it of course, verbally people would assume it was “colour” and it is a made up name. (Of course it is, it was a trademark). This migrated to delicolor.org.uk when I returned to regular employment and I eventually picked up iangrey.org.uk when it became free. (I’m now using iangrey.org, as my otherwise excellent ISP can’t cope with regional domains).

When you get a domain (& they aren’t expensive, .org.uk is typically less than £7 for two years) you also get the email ranges that go with it, i.e. (almost anything)@domainname (unless you get done over by your ISP, of course).

A number of years back, the .name domain came out, aimed at individuals. I registered ian.grey.name (& Karen & David) but it didn’t quite do what it said on the tin, because as well as (anything)@ian.grey.name it was meant to be possible to use ian@grey.name as well. (Had it worked, I would have kept it).

I have been conscious, however, that Karen is shortly having to use karen@iangrey.org which smacks a little of nepotism, having to use my personally named domain name for her emails. So I thought- should we have a more neutral domain name, something short, snappy, easy to remember and unambiguous? So I started thinking up words and feeding them into availability searches. Zilch, nitch, nada. I could only find cryptic ones¹ or ones in backwater domains. (I had decided I wanted a .net, as .org suggests an organisation and .com suggests a company. Similarly, .biz suggests a business and .info suggests a library. .net was originally intended for ISPs only identifying inherent internet infrastructure, but ISPs started doling it out and it is now apparently regarded as the second .com.)

So, I thought, if this is such hard work for random dips into random names, there must be better ways of tracking down names? The answer is yes, of course, you can get tools to do it. So I downloaded Domain Name Pro, which gives a thirty day cut down free trial. After trying it out, I decided to set it going to see if there were any three letter domains (Each letter can be a-z, 0-9 or -(dash) with some constraints). So I set it going searching the .net and .biz domains (the limits of the trial software). When I checked back in the morning, I was surprised to find that there weren’t any available at all, diddly squit. All snaffled up.

There are some four letter ones available, but how many I don’t know as it would take days to run. I did see that ls27.net was available (LS27 is the postcode for Morley) but it wouldn’t be overly transferable if we moved house to Huddersfield, London, or Adelaide. (You never know…)

¹Anyway, if anyone is looking for a domain with a hint of technical theatre, spargepipe.net and fuflight.net are still up for grabs. Don’t all rush at once…