How to choose a good website/company name?

Question

A friend and I have a small web hosting company, and we want to take things to the next level. Part of the deal is to get a new name (the current name was chosen pretty quickly a long time ago, and contains my friends online pseudo), but we're having a hard time to find a good one.

We can either choose a "descriptive" name, that contains some keywords related to what we do (web, net, hosting, etc...), will help for SEO and may give people an idea of what we do, or we could have a "fancy" name, that sounds good, is catchy and easy to remember, but will not help for SEO or giving clients a clue.

Both kinds are equally hard to find, because in the first case most of the meaningful/cool names are already take, and in the second case... well... it's hard to come up with a catchy/sexy name ;).

How do you guys cope with this issue? Do you have any name recommendation for a web hosting company?

The name would be both the domain name and the (registered) company name.

Answer 1

I had this problem not to long ago. I suggest having a few people sit around and brainstorm ideas. Not all the domains are taken that are "cool". A lot of what will make a domain good will be the product you provide. I managed to get a domain for my hosting company that is easy to remember and has relevant keywords in it. It didn't come to me in 10 min or anything but I brain stormed and talked it out with some close friends and finally found one I liked.

I agree that having the word host in the name for a web hosting company is a useful thing but depending on the hosting you have a wealth of keywords to use. VPS, dedicated, cloud, shared and any other synonymous words.

In summary, get a few people together, brainstorm, and keep checking to see if the domains are registered.

Answer 2

Why not go for the best of both worlds and have somethinghost or somethinghosting where the something is meaningful and cool. Others have done it: bluehost, hostgator, etc.