thrashiedean.com

Only you, of course can answer the question posed by this article\’s title.  But the very fact that you are reading an article on this arcane subject indicates that you\’re thinking about domain names and have some interest in the web.  You are aware that domain names are cheap and inexpensive web hosting is available for every reason, personal or commercial.

You certainly should register your name if you ever intend to use it in a commercial venture.  If you don\’t, somebody else almost certainly will–and probably has already done so!  At least as a dot-com.  There is very little hope, for example, that you can register your family name with a dot-com extension.  Does that sound a bit alarmist?  Consider this: as of this date four years ago 100% of the top most common 10,000 family names (Johnson, Smith, Jones, Garcia, etc.) had been registered as dot-coms. Nor is there much chance of getting your first name registered by itself.  All of the 1219 male first names and 2841 female first names listed by the good old U.S. Census have been registered as dot-com domain names.

You still have a chance of getting your first and last name combined as a dot-com domain name. Or you did as of four years ago when 90,000 possibilities remained to be registered.  But considering that figure is four years old and a domain name is being registered every five seconds or less, how much longer do you think you can wait before every possible permutation is gone?

Of course there will be openings in other domain name extensions for years to come.  There are, after all, over two hundred country-code top level domain extensions like dot-cn for China, dot-nl for the Netherlands or even dot-us for the United States of America.  But like it or not, the first extension people think of when looking for a web address is dot-com.  JohnDoe.Com will always be remembered before JohnDoe.Bz.  If your name is still available as a dot-com you might want to seriously consider purchasing it now rather than later–if at all!

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