An immediate issue for the less tech savvy people will be that when you hand them a business card with www.example.co some people may think it’s a typo and add the “m” themselves. That’s fine if you own the .com but a real problem if you don’t. On top of that, the jury is still out on how moving to a .co will effect search engine optimization. Google already favours .co.uk domains in the UK for example in a bid to bring local content to the user. So what will a columbian (.co) based domain name do?

In it’s favour it does look similar to .com but saves a whole key press when typing a domain into your browser. In conclusion, even at £30 per year it would be a good idea to secure your .co just incase it does become the new .com…

Most important passwords (highest first):

1. Email login

Your email password is the easiest for someone to crack. Your email also means they can gain access to every website you have ever signed up with. They can do this remotely without you ever knowing which is why you must have this password as long as possible.

2. Computer login

Your computer login should be different to every other password. Your computer login should never be transmitted unencrypted or written down. This doesn’t need to be as insanely long as your email password because people shouldn’t be able to remotely access it, but it should be long enough for someone not to easily see you type it in. Remember, if someone has access to your computer and cracks your password, then your email account password may be forfeit too.

3. Everything else

What your up against:

It’s important to know what your up against in the battle for online security. The bad guys that want your email account for sending spam, committing fraud etc have bot nets. These are computers which they control remotely to do whatever task the bad guys need. In this case they may have 1000 computers on their botnet and they have decided they are going to hack your email. With a thousand computers, they can try to log into your account 500 times a second (assuming 2 seconds for a connection attempt). So if your password is literally just a word, they will succesfully guess it in less than 5 minutes. If your password consists of 8 randomly generated numbers and letters then this botnet will take 179 years to try every password combination. The problem is that botnets are growing in size every day and yoru passwords need to keep up with this trend.

Security Tips:

1. Don’t use webmail. You will be tempted to use on public machines or round a friends house etc… and if yoru using webmail, then you can remember the password which means the password is probably too easy to guess.
2. Your password should be long, very very long. Ideally it needs to be more than 20 characters of random mixed case letters, numbers and symbols. “But how will I remember that?” I hear you ask. You save this password into your email client e.g. Thunderbird.
3. Use an email client. Here is a guide on how to get thunderbird to encrypt your email passwords, which adds a further level of security should your computer be stolen. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Master_password
4. All your email activities should be encrypted, if your email provider doesn’t support this then move away from them ASAP and get a proper provider. The way to set this up will be different for some email providers and some email clients but generally you will want to switch to using SSL. Here’s a guide on how to do this with Thunderbird. http://webnet77.com/secure-email.html
5. Use IMAP instead of POP on your mailboxes and take regular backups.

If you’re a UK based company then the next natural choice would be the .co.uk top level domain instead of .com. This is what we chose to do as adire.com was already registered to somone in Norway. You could also attempt to buy the .com version of your domain from the current owner, but this can get expensive as some people may try to hold the domain to ransom.

If you’re in the advantageous (and exciting) position of being a startup company that is still choosing the company name then you will find this process far easier. There are a range of ways for you to find both a company name and the domain name at the same time. A good example of this is a company that needed a domain name to sell digital publications. Meeqi Ltd which owns meeqi.com needed a short, memorable, easy to spell domain name. When they began their search, all of the 4 letter domain names had been snapped up and 5 letter domains were soon becoming an endangered species. They made use of a wide range of tools to help find a short domain such as Domain Soup’s five-letter-random-domain-names which can be used to scour random 5 letter domains for availability. makewords.com is also very good, which generates and searches domain names based on a few adjustable settings.

Other techniques are finding a related word in another language and then seeing if it’s free. A classic example of this is Ubuntu, a freely available operating system. It is named after the South African ethical ideology Ubuntu meaning “humanity towards others”.

Be aware of what you are competing with in search engine rankings for search terms. For instance don’t buy ubuntu-ideas.co.uk and expect to appear above a huge site such as ubuntu.com for the search term “ubuntu”.

Also be aware of what your domain and company name really mean, for instance “adire” in latin means “move forward” but “adiré” in french means “lost”. I prefer to think Adire is moving forward, rather than being lost!

Good luck with your domain name.