namecheckr FAQ
What is namecheckr.com?
namecheckr.com is a tool to research domain and social username availability. Picking a unique and available name is a challenge for brand managers and creatives. namecheckr.com aims to simplify that process by helping our users find the best name for their new or existing project across many networks.
What are the rules for searching?
We only allow alphanumeric searching with dashes and underscores to be processed through our service.
What do the little icons mean?
The green check means that this service has the requested name available as far as we can tell. The red circle indicates the opposite. The gray exclamation point means the name violates our guidelines for a valid username for that service (i.e., the name is too short, too long, or contains characters the service might not allow.)
Please note: Invalid and unavailable lookups are cached to help speed up the process in the future. Generally speaking, unavailable items don't become available (the exception being domain names) all too often. As such, we do not ask the server again until our local cache for the lookup has expired. We are currently playing with the expiration timeframes and will likely post those times when we have finalized them.
I got a throttled message?
To prevent abuse of our system, we impose a modest throttling system. If you hit it, and you feel it was too sensitive, let us know.
Why is (service) not included in your lookups?
There are many different reasons we might not be including a lookup that you feel is critical to your brand search. We often have to disable lookups due to a change in the process by which we check for username availability. In other circumstances, we may not be able to return a result reliably, and we are working on improving our process to do so.
Why is our brand name still showing available?
This could be for a whole host of reasons, but commonly is due to our caching system. To be a good netizen, we try to hold onto our results for a set amount of time. In this way, we don't nag these services or registrars with lookups that we already know the answer. In most circumstances, "taken" results are held onto for a longer period because it can take months/years before those names are released.
Always be sure to check each service/TLD individually. We aim to be as accurate as possible, but there could be circumstances where we are wrong or showing cached data. Use our service to give you an idea of availability, but we encourage all users to double-check any result they get on namecheckr.com. If you feel like a lookup is broken, please send an email to hello@namecheckr.com.
Add/Remove my service!
If we are scraping your service for information, and you'd like us to stop email us at hello@namecheckr.com. Likewise, if you want us to include your service in our look-ups let us know!
I need help or found a bug..
Send questions, comments, or bug reports to: hello@namecheckr.com.
I want to buy namecheckr!
We genuinely appreciate your interest and believe that everything can be for sale for the right price. That said, we are not interested in selling namecheckr.com at this point.
I want to advertise on namecheckr!
Google Adsense is our primary means of delivering relevant ads on namecheckr.com. If you are looking to buy specific ad time on our site, please email hello@namecheckr.com. We are NOT looking to integrate any additional advertising distribution partners at this point.
domcheckr FAQ
What is domcheckr?
A new feature of the namecheckr.com platform is our new domain matrix we have nicknamed domcheckr. We now scrape the most popular registrars for their pricing on domains to make it easy for users to shop for a domain TLD they might be interested in.
What is Reg+Renew value?
As we collected data, we noticed that many registrars would have outstanding registration fees for a new domain, but their renewal prices were noticeably higher. We think a useful data point is to calculate the first and second year of domain registration costs. The Reg+Renew value is the first year registration (1 year only) plus the renewal (1 year renewal) added together. We think this helps highlight the best 2-year value for new projects where a user might not take advantage of multi-year discounts.
Price is different than what I see?
Registrars offer many different sales and pricing options for individual users for a variety of different reasons. We capture the data we can, but we encourage every user to validate any pricing options that might be available directly to them (as an existing customer) or sales since the last time we updated the pricing for a particular registrar.
How often are the prices updated?
Registration data can change frequently for certain TLDs and not as often for others. We are still working out the best schedule for when our data is updated, and we post the day we reviewed that registrar for that domain on our TLD details page.
Why is pricing missing for certain domains?
We were not able to access it at the time we were updating the service.
What are the tiny numbers in red beneath the domain pricing?
This is the price difference between the price in that column for that registrar compared to the best price for that column. Again, we are attempting to highlight the cost differences so users can value other features registrars offer compared to their domain prices.
Why are certain registrars linked while others are not?
Any registrar we have a link to includes an affiliate link. These links give a small percentage of the sale back to namecheckr which helps support our service. We opt'd to include all the services regardless of our affiliate relationship to ensure our users had the best possible picture to make their purchasing decision.
Do you have shortcut URLs to the domain pricing pages?
Yes! You can use chkdo.com/TLD or chk.do/TLD to link to a specific domcheckr page. For example, you can see .com pricing at chk.do/com or .uk.com pricing at chkdo.com/uk.com. Both domains can be used interchangeably.