Italian domain names

As all the obvious .com domain names have already been snatched up, people have begun to find other ways to get a memorable, meaningful domain name for their site. One way is to invent words that the domain speculators haven’t thought of (‘Google’, ‘Flickr’, ‘Writely’, ‘Skobee’, ‘Renkoo’). Another inventive solution is to use a ‘domain hack’, such as http://del.icio.us, where the URL in its entirety makes up a word or phrase.

Of course some top level domains (TLDs) have more potential for domain hacking than others. In terms of phrases, the Italian TLD .it is great, because lots of short English sentences can end in ‘it’. And interestingly, there are a lot more ‘memorable’ domains still available with the .it extension than there are for many other popular TLDs

The resason for the comparatively greater availability of .it domains at this stage is probably two-fold. Firstly, ownership of an Italian domain name is restricted to EU citizens only and limited to one domain per individual (you have to submit your National Insurance number during the application process so they can verify your elegibility). I guess this makes it hard for all those domain name speculators in the US. And secondly, the Italian registry has a lot of red-tape making it much more fiddly to register one.

But for a UK national it doesn’t seem to be too hard. Last week I registered the domain name reviewed.it. With the addition of a subdomain or two this allows me to create URLs like http://someone.reviewed.it or http://ben.reviewed.it.

It is a bit harder to find a domain company that will sell you a .it domain name, probably because of all the hassle involved in sending faxes in Italian. I used Nameroute, who were really helpful and are generally good guys.