Choosing a domain name should be pretty easy.  For most companies you simply add a “.com” to your company name and you’re good to go.  That is, unless mashing the letters in your name together makes a new word or phrase, which may result in something you didn’t intend.

In fact, you might end up with something unintentionally hilarious (or worse).

For example, Who Represents is a company that provides information about celebrity agents, managers, etc.  So naturally whorepresents.com is their domain.  But that domain could also serve as a place to order gifts for prostitutes – WhorePresents.com.  It’s not surprising that Who Represents tries to make their purpose clear visually:

Then again, the notoriety probably helps their traffic.  I’m pretty sure that’s the case for Pen Island, “the best place to get custom made pens”.  Naturally, you can find them at penisland.net.  You can parse the other meaning for yourself.

Sometimes these mistakes it’s kind of subtle.   If I was looking to buy or sell scrap metal, visiting AmericanScrapMetal.com would make sense, even though I might be searching for AmericansCrapMetal.com.  To my knowledge, while there is “pot metal,” there is no “crap metal” in the industry.

I don’t know who Emma is but she has a whole society devoted to her nether orifice at analemma.org.  An “analemma” is an astronomical diagram.

You’d think that people who work in the psychology field would be very sensitive to triggering patients, but you have to wonder if someone visiting TherapistFinder.com isn’t concerned they might be visiting TheRapistFinder.com.

Sometimes you have to wonder…when the Mole Station Native Plant Nursery decided on molestationnursery.com, didn’t someone say it out loud?

There are domain hacks as well.  I’m skeptical that swissbit.ch understood its mistake since they’re presumably German, Italian, or French speakers over there in the Alps.  And I’m willing to let Power Generation Italia – who chose powergenitalia.com as their domain – slide because the goof would never have occurred to an Italian.  But they speak English on the Cook Islands so the folks at budget.co.ck have no excuse.

So be careful when picking your domain names!  Perhaps you should start here.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.