A good domain name can be difficult to find… in particular when the domain name extension is highly demanded. It is what is happening with the .CLUB new gTLD. Should your Registrar tell you that the desired domain name is not available, it is not necessarily true.

Anybody involved in launching a website has to go through a search for a domain name, and most of the time, it begins with the following question: “is the .com available?”. Most of the time the answer is: “no it is not”. The same does happen for clubs searching for their domain name: if it is still easy to find the name of the club and register the corresponding domain name, it is becoming difficult to find a generic one such as pet.club for a pet club.

An example

A Pet Club is a club for pet lovers and a good domain name for such a club would be: www.pet.club, wouldn’t it?

• The first obvious thing to note is that there is no website when entering this domain name in a browser, which is a good thing because it probably means that the domain name is available for registration.
• The second good thing is the result, following in a search in the Whois database: “There were no records matching your WHOIS query”. This potentially confirms that the domain name is available for registration.
• Unfortunately, any attempt to register this domain name at any accredited Registrar to the .CLUB domain name extension will return the following answer “the domain name is unavailable”.

The problem

Anyone facing the registration of a domain name wants a good domain name, in the case of a club, you don’t want a .COM, you want to name your Club with a .CLUB. If pet.club does not seem available but might be, how to investigate further and where to go to ensure whether the domain name is free to register ?

When AlpNames answers that the domain name is not available, it only does its job because pet.club cannot be registered just like any other domain name so there is a place to go to when this happens.

The solution

Of course, there is a way to register pet.club, even if the process is confusing. The Registry for .CLUB domain names secured a list of special domain names which is available here.

The reason for this is simple: these domain names’ precision is highly targeted and has high value indicators: the year of the same registration for “pet.com” and “pet.net”, and a percentage of keywords registrations among the most popular domain extensions.

When a generic domain name is not available and cannot be found in the Whois database, chances are high that you will find it in a Premium Inventory.