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Successful Host With -DASH?
Offshore_Solutions
Member
in General
While most hosts choose ".com," we've seen Hosts can be very successful on ".net" & even on ".io."
But I couldn't think of a major successful hosting company using "-" dashes in it's domain.
Do you know of one? Could a host be successful with a "Best-Host.com" type of domain?
Could a Host be successful with a "-"?
- Could a Host be successful with a "-"?50 votes
- Yes50.00%
- No50.00%
Comments
Although I voted a NO as I dislike a dash in the domain name but honestly speaking, a good name wont matter if the services are shitty. Or, even if the name is a generic one & the services are phenomenal then you are in for a success
If the service is good enough, sure. But if you're just starting out, an easy to type domain will be more optimal.
IMO, success does not lie within a domain or the brand that's being used, but with the services and professionalism being offered.
OTOH, a good name is a bonus, because if your services/products don't make it, at least your domain can get you something later
Dash domains:
English = No
German = Yes
Good point! German Host Contabo 1st became a successful company as Giga-international.com from 2003 before changing their name to "Contabo" in 2013.
That's 10 years with the "dash."
Dashes are strangely accepted in Germany.
See: https://contabo.com/blog/giga-international-becomes-contabo/
mich-ael @SmallWeb
The biggest problem would be besthost.com (without the dash) being in your competitor's hands. The good thing is you're participating in a domain auction for what I think is a very good name, so maybe don't cheap out in the auction and you won't have to settle for best-host.com.
If the name consists of two distinct words, like "best-host", I personally find it much easier to read and recognize if there is some kind of separator between the two words.
So I'd prefer "best-host" over "besthost".
But maybe according to @amadex1337 that's just because I'm from Germany.
Ask @EvolutionHost how they got their domain.
That's just wrong. He's not invited to the Michael's club.
They bought it like anyone else.
php-friends
No. If a company has a really good reputation then the name stops mattering but in the beginning when you're trying to grow a business, the dash just makes it look amateurish.
de-cix.net, try to remove dash
We have a poll for dash.. ?
Honestly, you can make have noMeaningWord and can be successful if they have quality and people will remember .. so ..
POLL !
yeah, there are few other countries where dashes are a thing (e.g. japan I think)... in Germany there is also https://all-inkl.com/ which is well established.
PS: a decision what to use simply depends on the audience you are targeting...
How does this happen that the majority of a particular culture, in this case the German culture, agrees that something like "dashes" are good in contrast to outside cultures (or that David Hasselhoff is talented)?
Well, I think it has more to do with the language itself.
In German language a dash is much more common.
For example in English you have an "IT budget" whereas in German the correct spelling is "IT-Budget".
Something like "best-host" wouldn't be correct in German, either. But it probably looks "less awkward" to German people than English folks.
Plausible explanation.
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-reason-businesses-in-Germany-and-prefer-to-use-hyphens-in-domain-names-while-its-a-big-no-no-in-the-English-speaking-world
That Quora answer seems to hit it dead on.
An interesting part to me:
"The only scenario where I see big brands investing in such names is if they already own the non-hyphenated name."
Here's where there may be an English exception to "no dash." Some words like "co-op" are written with a dash. Since one day I hope to start a hosting cooperative, I've registered the dash:
http://HostCo-op.com
fallout-hosting.com from @Ian_Dot_Tech seems to be a pretty successful company.
Domains don't really matter, it matters how reliable and legit you are.
Define successful.
Clients? Sure.
Profit? Sure.
How much profit? Dunnae.
IMHO, in hosting business domain/name doesnt matter quality of service does.
Atleast in a long term perspective.
Also don't forget the germany's 24!
Almost every company name has 24 number at the end...
Offshore-Solutions24.de would fit.
Yeah, our gaming brand has a - in it and does well for itself.
I used to work with a German guy, and I could tell which code comments were his because they'd have a lot of hyphens in them
As a front end developer, German translations are sometimes a nightmare due to the number of long compound words. The UI designers sometimes don't take huge strings into account when designing a UI that has lots of buttons side-by-side.
being German, working for an international company... so much this!
Also, when I first read "DASH" in capital letters in the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about the DASH video streaming technology.
At my workplace we have an option to display the longest strings out of all the translations, which is very useful for testing weird UI edge cases (since everything will render using the longest possible string for that UI element). The longest strings are usually German, but occasionally other languages have longer strings. There's also a fake RTL language that's English but rendered like a RTL language, so people can test how their page looks in RTL languages without having to understand Arabic or Hebrew (the UI is generally flipped in these languages, for example the site logo would be at the top right rather than the top left, and a left sidebar becomes a right sidebar)
Yeah, he was redundant.