Domain names

Domain Privacy

• Free for .co.uk & .uk
  

  Are you an individual with your own .uk or .co.uk domain name that’s not for business use? If so, you can use 20i’s Domain Privacy to hide your personal details for free.

• Keep your Personal Details Private
  

  Every time you register a domain you risk exposing your name, postal address, email and phone number to spammers, identity thieves and fraudsters.

• Privacy ON
  

  By using our Domain Privacy service, we’ll list our generic company ContactPrivacy.com as the contact for your domain name. This ensures that your confidential information isn’t available online.

• Stay in Contact
  

  You can still be contacted. Our service comes with free email forwarding of the protected email address to an e-mail of your choice. So you’ll continue to receive any notifications or enquiries.

What is a domain?

A domain name is an address for your website. Computers use IP addresses: long strings of numbers which would be hard to remember. A domain name is designed to be memorable by us.

These addresses are made up of two or three elements. Reading from right to left, the top-level domain (TLD) are the letters at the end (like .com), that are also known as an extension. The second level domain is the name of your website or company. The third level domain - or subdomain - can be something like blog.example.com or www.example.com.

Your web address (second-level domain) can contain a combination of numbers, letters and hyphens, but not any other punctuation marks or special characters. They ignore upper and lower case, so you can capitalise the first letter of words in publicity material for easy reading. They can be a maximum of 63 letters long.

Which-Top Level Domain?

If you’re looking for a website address for a new business, you might like to go for a top-level domain (TLD) that matches your geography - called a country-code top-level domain (ccTLD). Like .uk, .us, .scot, .wales or .it. Or even more local, like .london.

Or perhaps you’d prefer something more international like .com, .org, .net, or .info? If it’s a personal site, perhaps consider something like .me or .blog?

Or you could go for something more descriptive. The new generic TLDs (gTLD) like .dev, .online, .agency and .solutions offer plenty of options.

Whether your new site is for a business or hobby, there are over 400 to choose from, so you’re likely to find a TLD that covers your products or services.

How to choose a domain name

Registering a name for your site shouldn’t be done in haste. It will be central to your identity, whether that’s for a small business, startup or your own personal brand. If your project is a success, then you could be using it for many years to come.

It may only take seconds to purchase a domain from 20i today, but here are some things to consider before you buy:

• Can you say it easily?
  

  Word of mouth is still one of the best ways to get leads and recommendations. So make sure that it can be said easily, or if it does need to be spelled-out, keep it short.

• Will you use hyphens?
  

  Opinions differ on hyphens – some may find that they make your internet address more readable, whereas others avoid them.

• Is it memorable?
  

  The best way to make a website address memorable is to keep it short and unique. Of course, that’s easier said than done!

• Does it cover what you do?
  

  Consider having your product or service in your address, but exact matches can be seen by some - including search engines - as potentially ‘shady’.

• Has someone else got a similar domain?
  

  You don’t want your users getting confused, or to be a target of legal action. So we recommend checking this using a search engine.

• Will you need to buy variants?
  

  Fraudsters may try to copy your domain name, but with a different TLD. So consider whether it’s worth buying popular alternative extensions. For example, if you’ve bought example.com, you might want to buy example.net and others.