Ouch! You just discovered the domain name you'd been dreaming about is gone. Of course you had been visualizing it with a Dot-Com extension; but you found you were twenty years too late. It is still for sale but the owner wants more money for it than you paid for your house!

Ok, you were almost prepared for that; you'd been reading about how picked-over the Dot-Com names had become and while you were a bit disappointed you weren't surprised to find your dream-name gone. So you decided to settle for Dot-Net.

Guess What? You discovered that many Dot-Com owners purchased the Dot-Net extension at the same time to avoid anyone getting too close to their name. And the Dot-Info and the Dot-Org! Now what?

Back to the drawing board. You still want the name, but it's a business and you want it recognized as such. Picking just any old domain extension isn't good enough. You want something your customers can recognize and remember as being about business. That's when you heard about Dot-Biz. Dot-Biz has been around for a while and was actually conceived as a replacement for Dot-Com when the elder extension became crowded. So Dot-Biz it is!

Not! The Dot-Biz extension was gone too; the domainers are migrating there looking for cheap available names and your name already belongs to one of them. The price he's asking isn't unreasonable, certainly nothing like what the Dot-Com guy was demanding, but it's still a lot of money. Dot-Biz is the end of the line. There's just nowhere else to go for a guy that wants everybody to know his domain name is about business!

Sure there is! How about Dot-Bz? Doesn't Bz spell business just as surely as Biz? Hey, it's even easier to spell. And there is a likelihood you can get it for less than fifteen bucks.

Dot-Bz has been around since 1991. It's the country-code top-level-domain (cctld) of Belize in Central America, home of the ancient Mayans. The extension is administered by the University of Belize and there are no restrictions on its purchase. In fact, since there are less than half a million people living in Belize, it's been forced to be reasonable about distribution. Believe it or not, it's one of the most popular website extensions in Italy; apparently the official abbreviation of the Italian province of Bolzano-Bozen is Bz.

What's more-and this is the important part for you-there are a lot of English words that haven't been registered yet. The domainers will get there eventually, but for now you have the best chance of finding the name you need among any of the easily recognized business-friendly domains.

A recent test found a number of three and four letter acronyms not to be found in any of the other business oriented extensions: "kaf," "utd," and "nbo" for example. You don't want an acronym? Cool! Bz is one of the last popular extensions where you can find three and four letter domain names that form actual words, not gibberish...excuse me, acronyms (One man's gibberish is another man's company name. IBM anyone?). Try one of these: glib; rug; blow; then and atom. Probably none of these float your boat, but the point to be made is that there is still plenty of room for domain names containing short English words and acronyms in Dot-Bz, something you can no longer find in Dot-Com, Net, Org, or Biz. Grab the nearest domain name search box and give it a try. And hurry, the domainers will be there shortly.