From shortlist to registered, without regret

Say it to somebody

The cheapest tests are the most predictive, and there are four of them. All four take one phone call each, and between them they catch nearly everything an availability checker cannot see.

Look at it lowercase, and with the spaces gone

A domain is one unbroken lowercase string. Anything you were relying on capitals to separate disappears at that point, and the letters left touching each other sometimes spell something you did not intend.

Write the candidate out three ways — as the bare domain, as an email address, and in a browser tab where it will be truncated — and read each of them as if you had never seen the name before. Two-word names are the usual casualties: the second word's first letter joins the first word's last letter and produces a reading nobody wants on their invoices.

Search the name properly

A single search of the exact name is a start and not a check. Four passes, ten minutes:

1. 1The exact name, in quotation marks and without them, and past the first page of results — the first page is dominated by whatever is popular, not by whatever conflicts with you.
2. 2The name plus your sector, which is how you find the small competitor who has no SEO but does have customers.
3. 3Phonetic neighbours and near-spellings: the plural, the missing letter, the doubled letter, the obvious alternate spelling. Confusion does not require an identical string.
4. 4The app stores, product directories and platforms your customers actually use, where a product with your name may exist and never appear in a web search.

Worth adding, if you are naming a company rather than only a product: your national company register, and the register of anywhere you intend to trade. How to check if a business name is already being used covers that side of it in detail.

Trademark, properly

An available domain says nothing about trademarks. They are separate systems, and the domain is the one with no legal weight.

Search, at minimum:

• Your own national register — for Cyprus, the Department of Registrar of Companies and Intellectual Property.
• EUIPO, for EU-wide marks that bind you regardless of where you are registered.
• USPTO, if you will ever have US customers, which for a web product means yes.
• A plain web search for the name plus your sector — an unregistered mark still creates rights in many jurisdictions.

You are looking for the same or a confusingly similar mark in the same class of goods. A bakery called Velora does not block a developer tool called Velora. A different developer tool does.

Constructed names have a real advantage here: an invented word is far less likely to collide, and far easier to register as a mark yourself later.

Where the launch is expensive or the category crowded, treat all of this as the input to a professional clearance opinion rather than a replacement for one. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and a search that finds nothing is not the same as a search that proves nothing exists.

Check the handles at the same time

A domain with no matching handles is a name you will spend years qualifying — '@velorahq', '@getvelora', '@velora_app'.

Check the ones that matter for your product before registering, not after. For most software that is GitHub, X, LinkedIn, and whichever of Instagram or TikTok is relevant. For consumer products, add the app stores.

This is another argument for invented names. A dictionary word has had its handles taken since 2009.

What it means somewhere else

A constructed name is a new string in every language, and occasionally it already means something.

Search the name alone, then translate it in a couple of large languages. You are looking for two things: an existing meaning that is unfortunate, and an existing company you had not heard of.

Five minutes here has saved companies from names that were fine in English and crude in Portuguese.

If the domain has a history, find out what it was

A name you are registering fresh has no past. A name you are buying from somebody usually does, and it arrives with whatever that past left behind: old inbound links, an old audience, an old reputation, and occasionally an old business whose customers still email the address.

Look at what was published there before, and at what the name is associated with in search results. Most of the time this is uneventful. When it is not — a site that was penalised, or one whose subject matter you would not want to inherit — it is much better to know before the transfer than after.

For an ordinary first-time registration, skip this. For any purchase with a real price attached, it belongs in the same conversation as the price: see how to know what a domain is worth.

Compare the winner against two alternatives

A candidate you have been carrying around for a week always looks strong on its own. Put it beside two others and score all three on the same criteria, in the same sitting, and the comparison is frequently uncomfortable.

One question is worth asking out loud before you pay: would you still choose this name if every candidate on the list were equally available? If the honest answer is no, what you like about it is the availability rather than the name, and that is not a quality that survives launch.

Register it properly

When you buy, a few settings matter more than the price:

• Turn on auto-renew. The most common way to lose a domain is forgetting it, not being outbid.
• Turn on WHOIS privacy. It is usually free and keeps your home address out of a public database.
• Register for more than a year if you are confident. It costs the same per year and removes an annual chance to forget.
• Use an email address that will still exist in five years — not one on the domain you are registering.
• Turn on two-factor authentication for the registrar account. It holds the keys to your website and your email.

That fourth one is a genuine trap. If your registrar account uses an address at the domain itself, and the domain lapses, you cannot receive the email that would let you recover it.

Look at the renewal price and the transfer rules before the first-year price, too. A cheap first year at a registrar that renews at four times the going rate and makes leaving difficult is not a saving, it is a subscription you have not read.

Keep the runners-up

Do not throw away the shortlist once you have chosen. Trademark searches turn up problems late, co-founders veto things, and occasionally you simply go off a name after a week of saying it.

Save the second and third choices somewhere you will find them. They are the cheapest insurance you will ever have, and regenerating the same shortlist later is not possible — availability moves.

Keep the notes as well as the names: what you searched, what you found, and why the winner won. In six months, when somebody asks whether you checked a particular register, the answer should not depend on memory.

The order that wastes least time

1. 1Generate and check a large batch. Keep everything available.
2. 2Read them aloud. Cut anything you stumble over.
3. 3Take the top five through the spoken tests, in both directions.
4. 4Search each survivor properly — exact, sector, near-spellings, app stores.
5. 5Trademark-search what is left. Cut collisions.
6. 6Check handles, and read the address lowercase and unspaced.
7. 7Compare the last three side by side, then register the winner the same day with auto-renew and privacy on.

The whole sequence is an afternoon. Rebranding is a quarter.