Choosing and buying a domain name without getting burned

Buying a domain name is ten minutes and about ten euros a year. The act is simple. Getting burned is just as easy, if you skip two or three details before confirming the payment.

The name first, the extension after

A good name can be said out loud without spelling it. Short, memorable, no hyphen or digit to complicate dictating it over the phone. For a portfolio, first-name-last-name is the safe bet: people are looking for you, so let it be you they find.

The extension comes next, and it carries a signal. The .com stays the reference, the one people type on reflex. The .dev forces HTTPS and rings true for a developer. A country extension like .fr anchors you locally, which makes sense if your work is there. I would avoid the trendy exotic extensions: they feel like a gimmick and stick poorly in memory.

Where to buy it, the real comparison

Where you buy mostly changes the cost over time and the quality of the DNS tools. Three options cover most cases:

• Cloudflare Registrar: sells at cost, no markup and no hike at renewal, with fast DNS. Ideal for a .com or a .dev;
• OVH: home turf for country domains, a European provider with data and billing in the EU. The interface is dated but it does the job;
• Namecheap: simple and reliable, a solid international default.

The criterion that matters is not the first-year price, it is the renewal price and how clean the DNS interface is, because that is the one you will handle to wire up your hosting.

The first-year-price trap

Some registrars advertise a rock-bottom first year, then renew at triple. Always read the renewal rate, not the welcome promo. Check too that WHOIS privacy is included: without it, your name, address and contact email become public. Serious registrars provide it for free.

Once the domain is bought, wiring it to your host comes down to two DNS records. I cover the full deployment in another article: putting your portfolio online for free.

What I'm not selling you

A domain is a recurring cost. Small, but yearly, and forever as long as you keep it. It also does not make you visible: being found on Google is indexing and SEO, a whole different job from buying the name. And if your registrar doubles as a CDN, like Cloudflare, a proxy setting turned on at the wrong moment can silently break your host's certificate. It made me double-check which "cloud" was lit up.

Verdict

The name does not make the brand. But a bad name, unreadable or impossible to spell over the phone, drags it down before anyone has seen the first page. The real work is not finding a perfect name, it is picking a decent one and moving on.