Notes
Choosing the name Crafnia
The name on this domain was not the first choice, or the tenth. It came out of a naming search that took longer than it should have, mostly because the tools I trusted at the start turned out to lie in a specific, unhelpful way. This is what actually happened, including the mistake in the middle of it.
What I actually wanted was craft.com
The root of the name is craft — the word for making things by hand, which is the closest one-word description of what a small software workshop does. The first choice was simply craft.com. It was already registered, by someone else, for something unrelated. That ruled out the cleanest option immediately and started a much longer search than expected.
A hundred names, and most of them gone
From there the search widened into anything built around "craft" plus a short suffix, and separately into other words entirely. Over a hundred candidate names were checked in total. The result was blunt: something close to 95% of the candidates that were real, ordinary English words already had an owner on the common top-level domains. Short, meaningful, pronounceable English words are close to fully claimed — that is not a surprise in the abstract, but running it against a hundred real candidates makes the scale of it concrete in a way that guessing does not.
The domain that looked free and was not
One candidate, hicraft.com, looked available. An ordinary DNS lookup on it returned nothing — no A record, no nameservers, nothing resolving. That is exactly what an unregistered domain looks like from the outside, so for a while it looked like a genuine find.
It was not. The domain was already registered; it simply had no nameservers configured, so it never resolved to anything and a plain DNS query came back empty either way. A domain with no nameservers and a domain that was never registered produce the identical result under a normal lookup — DNS alone cannot tell the two apart, and there is no way to fix that by looking harder at the same tool.
The tool that does tell them apart is RDAP, the registration data protocol
that queries a registry directly rather than asking the DNS resolution chain to infer
ownership from whether a name resolves. Querying rdap.verisign.com for a .com
domain, or the general-purpose rdap.org as an entry point for other registries,
returns the actual registration record — registrant status, creation date, whether it is
held at all — regardless of whether the domain happens to have working nameservers that day.
Every candidate name from that point on was checked with RDAP first, DNS second.
What the search actually looked like
In practice this was not one clever idea followed by a quick availability check. It was a list that grew candidate by candidate: compound words built around craft, synonyms for making and building, short invented syllables, and a handful of words in other languages that might read cleanly in English. Each one went through the same two-step check — RDAP first to see whether it was actually registered, then a plain read of how it looked as a URL and sounded out loud. Most candidates died at the first step. A few survived RDAP but failed the second one anyway, because a string that is technically available is not automatically a name worth building a domain-wide brand on top of — some read as unpronounceable, some already meant something unrelated and distracting in a search result, and some just did not sound like the name of anything.
Landing on Crafnia
The name that survived that process is craft plus -nia, a suffix that reads like the end of a place name — the same shape as Narnia — so the combined word sounds like the name of a land rather than a company. That fits the actual structure of the site: a root domain with a separate subdomain for each app, closer to a small collection of towns under one flag than a single product with one name. It also had a practical advantage the earlier candidates lacked: RDAP came back clean across every relevant top-level domain, meaning nobody else was already using it anywhere that a search would surface.
It also satisfies a rule set before the search started: no person's name in the brand. A name tied to one individual cannot be handed off, sold, or shared credit on the way a neutral one can, and a workshop that might eventually include more than one person's work should not be named after whoever happened to start it.
Why .com over the cheaper-looking options
Some newer top-level domains advertise startlingly low first-year prices — an .online or .site domain can be had for roughly 50–70 Thai baht in year one. That price is a loss leader. The renewal price the following year, and every year after, lands around $28.84, several times what a .com typically renews for. A domain name is a multi-year cost, not a one-time purchase, so the number that matters is the recurring one, not the introductory one. Between that and .com simply being the extension people type without thinking, .com won even though it was not the cheapest sticker price on the page.