May 8, 2009

Relationship between Domain Name Registration and Company Name Registration


A blogger, in a comment to a previous post about the legal process to set up your company, asked with respect to the name registration through Form 1A and later on Form 1, the following:
Another issue is to register your domain name over www under W3C.Mean when we register our company then MCA(Ministry of company affairs), provide a domain name for our company or we need to process it by our own.
If yes,then when we get the authorization to register a domain name directly after getting
Apply for ROC for the name of company or After the submission of form 1,8,and 32.
Maybe it makes sense that we would like the domain name of our web-site to be the same of our company, however, it is not a requirement and many times, because of lack of availability, it won't be possible. Thus, I really think the best is to register your domain name as soon as possible, without waiting for your Company Name registration, and even less, waiting for the Company Incorporation.

What you could do to make sure that they somehow match is to use for your domain name, only the main word or the acronym. For instance, my company is Encyclomedia Communication and Marketing Pvt. Ltd. Certainly, I would not have tried calling my web-site www.encyclomediacommunicationandmarketing.com: who would remember that?

I tried getting www.encyclomedia.com, or .co.in, but wasn't available. So, I chose www.ecam.co.in which is the acronym for the full name of the company.

Imagine my Company Name had been rejected... I don't really think it would have been a big problem. In the worst of cases, I would have setup another domain (even if totally different) and re-direct it towards the IP where www.ecam.co.in is stored. But by that time, there would already be more visitors than I would have had if I had never opened the web-site, thus I would have more prospect clients from the very beginning.