Pick the name your customers will say out loud, register it as a .bt and a .com if both are free, and set up email on it the same week. That is the short version. The rest of this guide is the reasoning, and the 4 places people go wrong.
.bt or .com
.bt is Bhutan’s country domain. It says where you are before anyone reads a word, it ranks a little better for searches made inside Bhutan, and it cannot be confused with a company in Bangalore. Registration goes through the national registry, nic.bt, is priced in Nu. and paid yearly. You can register directly at the second level (yourname.bt) or under .com.bt, .org.bt and the rest; the short form is the one to want.
.com is the default the rest of the world types. If you sell to tourists, take payments from abroad or expect to be found by someone who has never heard of Bhutan, you need it, and it costs about US$ 10 to 15 a year at any registrar.
Most businesses should hold both. Use the .bt as the main address if your customers are in Bhutan, the .com if they are not, and redirect the other. A hotel in Paro is a .com with a .bt pointing at it. A hardware shop in Phuentsholing is a .bt, and the .com is insurance.
Do not take a .net, .org or .info because the .com was gone. A taken .com means someone else already owns the name in the mind of the internet. Choose a different name.
Naming
Short, sayable, spellable. Test each candidate 3 ways: say it over a phone call and ask the other person to type it; picture it on a signboard and see if it fits; read it as one lowercase word with no spaces and check nothing rude appears in the middle.
Avoid hyphens and numbers unless they are the name. nine75 is a number on purpose; nine-75 would be a mistake. Avoid words that only mean something in Dzongkha to a customer who searches in English, and the reverse.
Keep it under 12 characters where you can. Every extra letter is another chance to mistype it on a phone.
Dzongkha names in Latin letters
This is where most Bhutanese domain names go wrong, and it is nobody’s fault. Dzongkha has an official romanisation, and it is not how most people spell their own names. Tshering and Tsering, Dorji and Dorjee, Wangchuk and Wangchuck, Pema and Pem, Tashi and Trashi: each pair is the same word, and a customer will type whichever they learned at school.
Rules that work:
- Use the spelling on your trade licence and signboard. Consistency beats correctness.
- Say the name to 5 customers and ask them to write it down. The majority spelling is the domain. If it splits, register both and point the second at the first.
- Drop the apostrophes, hyphens and diacritics of scholarly transliteration; domain names cannot carry them and customers do not type them. “Ngawang”, not “Ngag-dbang”.
- Do not re-spell a Dzongkha word your English-speaking customers already know. It is “Druk” to everyone, whatever the transliteration table says.
If the business name is long, take the first word, or the word people use when they say “let’s go to ___”. Nobody types the full name of a hotel.
Trademarks
A domain is not a trademark, and owning one does not protect the other. Before you register, search the Department of Intellectual Property’s register for the name and anything close to it. If someone holds a mark in your class of business, a domain will not save you, and a cease-and-desist letter a year after launch costs more than a rename today.
Search internationally too, at least on a search engine with the name in quotes. You do not need a global clearance for a shop in Thimphu, but you do need to know that your chosen name is not a drug, a bank or a scandal somewhere else.
When the name is clear, file the mark. It takes months, and it is cheap next to what the domain will be worth in 5 years.
Email first
The domain’s most important job is not the website. It is the email. A quote from [email protected] gets read; the same quote from [email protected] goes to the tab people close. Set up mail on the domain the week you register it, before the site exists.
Use a role address, hello@ or bookings@, so the inbox survives when the person leaves. Set the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, or your mail will land in spam and no one will tell you. If you take a mailbox from your web host, check the storage limit; 2 GB fills in a year.
What we do
Registering and configuring a domain, with email and the DNS records above, is part of every nine75 site and available on its own. The domains service lists the current prices in Nu. If you are unsure between 2 names, send both and we will say which we would pick, and why.