I'm trying to start my own personal website but I'm having trouble coming up with a name. Incredibly greedy people have snatched up pretty much all the names that make any kind of sense. One is going for $1200 and the loser who bought it has had it for something like 13 years... A few others are even more expensive than that. If I had that kind of money lying around, I wouldn't be busting my butt to pick up freelance in the first place...

The one I'm thinking of taking, without the whole www. and .com parts figured in, is three words long, a total of 15 characters. They're all fairly short, simple words but I'm still concerned about the length. I have a whole sort of scheme figured out for it but I'm not sure if I should take the name or not...

If someone said to you, hey my website is [three words].com and they were simple words, do you think you'd remember it? Would it be tacky?

It's possible. I haven't gone on it in years, but in high school one of my favorite sites was albinoblacksheep.com. 3 words...completely nonsensical in terms of the content (it was mostly flash games and animations), but just strange enough to be memorable. If you have a longer name that's somewhat outside the box, you might also look into designing/having a catchy logo designed relevant to the site name...it gives your readers one extra thing to create a mental connection with, and, if all else fails, it gives more googling options if they can't remember the exact name. (Por ejemplo, my favorite webcomics are put out by Blind Ferret entertainment, which naturally has a cute little ferret logo. If I were to forget the name and type "blindfolded ferret webcomic," the first result is a link to one of their comics, which I could easily then trace back to the main site.)

I remember when domain registration was totally free, way back when but even then you'd have people sit on various domains because they didn't even have to pay a yearly fee.

One thing I'd think about doing is maybe making up a word...

Thinking things like Etsy, Revelry, Lumiosity, etc.

I know it is hard though when you want something easy to remember and descriptive.

Thanks, that's great advice. I think I can make it work for me.

Having asked that, I'm having a rough time deciding what host/registrar to use. I'm avoiding GoDaddy like the plague after they gave me crap while working on someone else's website. Just yesterday, my co-worker and I opened a chat for help and after about 10 minutes, all we'd gotten was, "This isn't my problem to troubleshoot" and "I can do it for you for $50". When I said I didn't want to pay them to do it for me, I wanted to know why the server wasn't co-operating, he basically hung up on us. My co-worker was in the midst of typing "thanks" when the chat closed entirely. As far as I'm concerned, he can take a short walk off a steep cliff.

I'm looking at Gandi - which is more costly - and Hostgator. I've looked at other places but I'm never going to decide at this rate. =/ I know I'm willing to pay a bit more for quality because I've already dealt with the cheaper option - GoDaddy - and I'm not impressed.

One of my favorite blogs from way before I was a blogger has 17 characters (excluding .com), 2-3 words, and I had that memorized easily. Most people don't hear about websites from word of mouth, right? Generally they're going to follow links and then their browsers will remember it until they subscribe.

Our domain is from GoDaddy and we're happy with it.

i've had limited experience, but yahoo small business has been less cumbersome for me to deal with than godaddy. might be worth looking into.