Domain Name and Personal Branding

After getting a good part of this site together, I thought that it would be cool to get a personal domain name for the site. A quick search on popular domain name providers brought me to Namecheap where I found out that a .com domain only costs USD8.88 for a year! 😮 That’s about the price of a cheap meal in the US, or in the case of Malaysia, USD 8.88 = ~RM36 which is about the price of 4 decent meals. The price is incredible. Also, since generally registering a new domain name is cheaper than renewing it (on Namecheap it’s $8.88 to register and $12.98 to renew). I decided to buy the domain name for 10 years to save more money upfront.

While looking at domain hosting options, I did a price comparison with GoDaddy which is another popular option and found out that Namecheap is MUCH CHEAPER. Below is the cost comparison between the two:

Going with Namecheap saves me up to ~RM700 (~USD 160), which in my opinion is quite a decent amount of money. With the domain registrar settled, I then went on a long quest of what domain name I should use. I did want to stick with a .com domain because it’s the cheapest but given how long the .com domain has existed, A LOT of names have been taken. These are some of the ones that I’ve considered but were taken:

• patrickchong.com (of course)
• pa3ck.com (Pa - three - ck, get it? heh)
• pa3k.com (same logic as above)
• patrickc.com
• cpatrick.com

After checking off all the names that were taken, this was the shortlist that I ended up with, and the reasons why I disqualified the respective possible domain names:

• chongpatrick.com (seems a lil weird)
• patrickcjh.com (not a fan of the shortform)
• pa3kchong.com (all the ones with the numbers start looking more like a spam site and less professional/smart when it’s meshed up with other words)
• p3kweb.com
• pa3fy.com
• patriqchong.com (works, but a little lame)
• patrick-chong.com (not a fan of the dash in there)
• patrickxchong.com (the domain I bought!)

All in all I decided to go with patrickxchong.com because

1. One of my first emails was patrickxchong[at]gmail[dot]com, and I still use it to this day.
2. It doesn’t look too bad with the ‘x’ in there and it still carries a professional look if I have it on my namecard/resume.
3. After checking with Namechk, it seems like patrickxchong is not quite a common username on a lot of platforms yet. So I took it as an opportunity for me to build a consistent personal brand under the patrickxchong name.

So with those thoughts, I bought my personal domain name of patrickxchong.com on Namecheap!

Only time will tell whether this investment in personal branding with pay off, or if it’s necessary at all. Aside from Twitter, I’ve found that I could change my username on most major platforms to patrickxchong. A list of all the platforms that I have an account with can be found at the Contact page.