Finding an unused domain name can be difficult. At the end of September, there were 4.1m registered .co.uk names, making it the most popular UK domain class, as well as 303,000 .org.uk names and 48,000 of the newer .me.uk names. As well as these, many UK businesses and individuals own addresses with a global suffix, such as .com.
Many businesses paid big money for a domain name during the dotcom boom. In the US, business.com changed hands for $7.5m and UK bank Halifax paid $1m for if.com.
Things have calmed down: the registrar for .uk domain names Nominet recorded 75,133 registrations in September, well below its record of 245,967 in March 2000. But if you want a "generic" English word (in other words, not the name of someone or something) - particularly in .co.uk or .com - you will probably have to make an offer to the existing owner.
Some are keen to sell. Name-shop.co.uk buys generic .co.uk domain names, in the hope it can sell or lease them. Director Angus Hanton says he sold three.co.uk to Hutchinson's mobile phone service 3 for £102,000.
However, this is at the top end. Hanton says he sold cheap.co.uk, cheaper.co.uk and cheapest.co.uk for a total of £18,000, to Braintree insurer Insure and Go - the firm confirms the sale, but would not comment on the price.
Angie Barrow, proprietor of name warehouser Any-web, says generic .co.uks, such as driedflowers.co.uk, can sell for £2,000 to £5,000. "The equivalent is a car registration," she says. "People want them, and the value goes up." If this still sounds expensive, domain name registration firm www.UK2.net advertises domain names priced from hundreds to tens of thousands of pounds. Auction sites such as Ebay.co.uk have some quite strong names selling - and failing to sell - for a few pounds.
If you need to cast around for ideas, you might be as well finding a free name and building it up through marketing. But what if your established brand name has been taken by someone else - known as cybersquatting?
You may be able to retrieve it without paying a ransom. Nominet operates a dispute resolution service for .uk names, and says that 70% of users are businesses with fewer than 50 staff.
The first stage of the Nominet service, in which a mediator tries to find a mutually agreeable resolution between the complainant and the respondent, is free of charge, and solves 55% of cases. Nominet can then organise an independent expert decision for £750, followed by an appeal panel costing £3,000 (neither price includes VAT).
Emily Taylor, company secretary of Nominet, says that complainants and respondents improve their chances by providing good evidence. The complainant might show that it had lost potential customers to the cybersquatter or that it had traded under the name for a long time, and the respondent could demonstrate a reason to register the domain name.
There is an equivalent process for the generic global domains such as .com: the uniform domain name dispute resolution policy (UDRP). Decisions are made by bodies such as the Swiss-based World Intellectual Property Organisation: Wipo's fees start at $1,500.
Taylor says that many problems arise from sloppy administration rather than maliciousness. To protect against mistakes, check to see who the named owner of a .uk domain name is through the "whois" search, at www.nominet.org.uk. An alternative, which can also check names for many domains worldwide, is available at www.nic.com/cgi-bin/wp.cgi.
