Domain Registration

Let's start early by registering a domain name.

But why?

Registration requires buying the domain. You might think that buying this early is quite stupid if the project doesn't pan out, and you are probably right, but I find that doing this early is a commitment i do to myself to finish this! Also even without really starting yet, I believe I can technically produce this, let's see in retrospect in a few months if I was right! (also buying domain is relatively cheap, so no big risks anyways).

Moreover, having a website means easy-sharing the project advancement! Just go to the website and try it yourself! It also promote tiny, very focused features that can quickly be deployed for other to try and give feedback. So no git feature branches that stays alive for months before being merged into main! Tiny, well-segregated functionality with minimal input/outputs usually means they are also the easiest to change if need be, which is also synonym of good software design!

Now let's go buy that domain! (but where? and which one?)

Buying the domain

Registration services

What it does: Registering a domain means you reserve a readable, easily memorable address name like origami.codes (hehe) to ensure no one else can use it. You then need to manage it with DNS management to control where that domain points to (so to your server where your website is hosted).

Some services to register a new domain:

• GoDaddy
• Namecheap
• AWS Route53
• Google Domains
• Bluehost
• Network Solutions

I didn't do a thorough investigation on all the differences between these providers, so I'll go with Route53 as I tried it before and I don't really have anything negative to say about it and it integrates well with the rest of the AWS services. Please share in the comments if you have any opinion on why one would be better than the others. Maybe for my future project I will try the OVHCloud suite. You can have a look here https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/domains/tld/ for the different top-level-domain available (like .com, .org etc). We are mostly used to .com, but a lot of funny tld are available with various pricing, for example a .motorcycles is listed at $1.60/yr but a but a .car is listed at $2,506/yr on OVH. If someone can also enlighten me why there is a >1000x price difference i'd like to hear it!

Frustration of finding a name

Now we need a good combination of name + domain that is catchy/easy to remember. The frustrating part about this is that you will find that most of the good name combinations are already taken, but there is usually no website involved, just some person/bot squatting the name and having a landing page to sell the name. After searching a name for a while, I sincerely believe that there are more squatted website than active one. Here is an example of such a squatted name: 3d-wall.com for $1600.

Final choice: corner.builders

Going back where the project idea came from: a way to paint a star in the kid bedroom top corner. So i choose corner.builders, and just bought it. It's empty for now, but we will soon populate it!

What's next?

Set up the DNS records to redirect to some dummy index.html page in a AWS s3 bucket, so the website has something to show! Stay tuned!