You have been building your website for months and its starting to really take shape. You are probably ready to take it one step further and you are interested in purchasing a domain name.

A domain name is a name which can be associated with your website on the Internet. For example, www.beginners.co.uk is a domain name. You can use this as very much your new house number, if you picture the Internet as one giant street.

All you hear now days is buy a domain name buy a domain name but being honest its really not that easy now days. Sure, they have come down in price but after you spend hours upon hours searching for it being available its probably just a huge waste of time.

For example, this week I have been searching for a domain name for a client. The client would like a domain name which can be associated with Shops here in the UK but they prefer to have a .COM because they want to trade internationally. Great I said, I would have a browse around and I did some searches at:

Network Solutions WHOIS Search

After more than 2 hours work I give up. I could not find a .COM which was suitable and available. When I did find a domain name that I thought would be worth exploring, I loaded into my web browser and took a look. What did I find, a for sale banner asking over $25,000. What!!!!

This is getting real silly and I am getting really frustrated. So I thought I would do a search for a domain name which was once registered but now available for registration. So I went to:

Whois Deleted Name Search

Hundreds upon hundreds showed but I was not interested in 1-800-netshop.com or 123shopvideos.com. These names are just too unrelated to what I wanted.

So where next, "I know", I thought... I would pop off to the domain auction and see if I can pickup a real bargain. Off I went to:

GOTO.COM Auctions

After spending another hour going through the listings I was even more frustrated by the fact that people are just placing prices on them which are by far way out of reach of most peoples expenses or budgets atleast. I was even more amused to find that there must be over 1,000,000 domain names for sale of Goto.com but I bet 99% have no bidders. What a waste of time....

People who register domain names because they think they are going to be worth something one day are called cyber-squatters? When you and I are looking for something to help a client out, or yourself for the matter, are being abused by cyber-squatters. Darn pain if you ask me.

So where do you go from here? Well if you are looking for the perfect domain name you are going to have to pay a price to either cyber-squatters or people who do not take the Internet seriously. There are hundreds of companies who buy and sell domain names which I guess is ok, but they have to do this down the right channel without placing silly prices on them.

If you are still wanting to register a new domain name, try placing words like "the" at the beginning and see how you get on. Good Luck!