How To Secure Your First Domain Name Correctly.

What types of characters can be used in a domain name?

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Domain Services

Benjamin Franklin once said that "If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail" and in many cases this has proven to be so true.

So before you decide on a name for your business, we would recommend making use of the SEO Flatrate Domain Services. It has always been wise to do your homework first to avoid any unnecessary disappointment at a later stage.

Just imagine for one second that you have started a business but you had not researched and secured your domain name before you started to advertise to the world. You could end up with your potential customers trying to locate your business online, but instead of finding your website they find a different business altogether that had already secured your preferred domain name well before you did! Here at SEO Flatrate we specialise in Startup businesses and small to medium enterprises, our team will not only help you find your desired domain name, but we can reserve, secure, host & even manage it for you from within our domain name management portal.

In general, only the following characters may be used in a domain name:

Letters a through z (no accents of any kind will be accepted). Note that domain names are not case sensitive. This means there will be no distinction made between upper case letters and lowercase letters (A = a);
The numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and/or 9
The hyphen character

Using Hyphens

MAny companies tend to use hyphens but there are limits on how you can use hyphens as below:

A hyphen cannot be used to start or end a domain name
Two or more hyphens cannot be in consecutive position

Basic Characteristics

Domain names must:

Be at least 2 or 3 characters long, dependant on the extension, EXCLUDING the extension. For example:
a.com is invalid as the length of the domain without the extension (.com) is only 1 character
why.com is valid as yes is at least 2 characters long
Be no more than 63 characters EXCLUDING the extension
Contain only letters, digits, and hyphens. For example:
It's-2-Bad-Domain.com is invalid as it contains illegal characters
its2gooddomain.com is valid as it does not contain illegal characters
its-2-good-domain.com is also valid as it does not contain illegal characters
Not start or end with a hyphens. For example:
-2-good-domain.com is invalid as it begins with a hyphen
2-good-domain-.com is invalid as it ends with a hyphen
bad--domain.com is invalid as it contains consecutive hyphens
2-good-domain.com is valid as it does not begin or end with a hyphen.

Take out our Domain Management services and we will automatically renew your domain for you, so that you dont risk losing it. If you would like to speak to a SEO Flatrate representative about our domain management services please call us on Bournemouth 01202 911141 today or send us an email to support@seoflatrate.co.uk and a member of the team will get back to you within 24hrs.