Some of you may have experienced the following scenario. You have this great idea for a new business or project. You already came up with the ideal name for it; short, descriptive, catchy, memorable, and simply top-notch for what you have planned.

Then, disaster strikes… When checking the availability of the domain name under .com you get the message “Domain not available” or “Domain taken”. It is even worse if you go to the website of that domain just to find out that it is not even actively used, but simply parked and offered for sell. What now?

There are several things you can do, some of which are very obvious:

1. Either you go back to the drawing board and come up with another name – with still no guarantee that the next one will be available. Since most users still prefer .com as the globally accepted extension, we start first to check similar names or different combinations of the chosen name. Surprisingly very few people actually consider keeping the name but changing the domain extension instead.
2. You can decide to try to acquire the initially chosen name. This is often a very expensive exercise costing far too much money; money that many startups don´t have or simply don´t want to use to invest in a domain name.
3. Alternatively you can wait until the name becomes available again and try to snap it up. This can happen but the odds are not really very high. If you want to give that a try, there are several domain catching service providers out there.
4. If you still prefer to use that very name you have chosen, but the above options are not for you, the only option you have is to register the name under a different extension. With over 500 alternative generic domain extensions that came onto the market in the last few years, there are plenty of options, which will serve you just as well, if not better.

Many of these new extensions might even be a better fit for your business. For example, what if you want to start a photography business and your name is John but octopolyphotography.com is already taken? Wouldn´t you agree that octopoly.photography, or octopoly.photos is just as good if not even better?

We recommend that you have a look at the list of all available domain extensions on our website.

Your Octopoly Team,
Everybody’s Second Favourite Domain Registrar!