Finding a Domain Name

My journey to finding an appropriate domain name for my personal website

Published
April 18, 2026

Defining the Requirements

So when I first set out to find a domain, I set the goal: I want to find a professional, memorable home base for a student portfolio and technical identity. Together with some constraints,

  • Must be professional for resume headers.
  • Avoid high markup registrars like GoDaddy
  • Balance modern TLDs like .sh, .io, or .tech versus the classic .com and
  • Ensure that, when I subscribe to it, there’ll be low long-term renewal costs

Evaluating the Candidates

Firstly, domains like adam.com or adamlee.com are out of the question as they were already taken. So my initial candidates are:

  1. adamlee.sh. It has a cool factor for a developer because of the shell-script pun. However, it has a high renewal cost of around SGD 50 a year, and it might confuse people who do not know what sh means.
  2. lgladam.com. I used my initials and my name, although it might be slightly cryptic. The lgl feels a bit weird.
  3. leejunlei.com. It is part of my legal name, which is strong for SEO, but it is long and I prefer to have my first name in it.

The Breakthrough

After playing around with different combinations, I found that by combining my first name, Adam, with the initials of my given name, Jun Lei, gave me a pretty good domain name: adamjl.com. Here are some pros of it:

  • It is mostly 6 characters long,
    • Which is very short for a .com domain (I was quite surprised that it was not taken yet)
    • Easy to remember
  • It’s a good balance of my identity as a whole

Selecting the right provider

With the domain name settled, I selected providers. I shortlisted domain providers like Spaceship, Cloudflare, and Porkbun. In the end, I chose Cloudflare Registrar for its stable pricing and charging at Wholesale prices. Additionally, the infrastructure, despite the cons of having to use its own nameserver, the pros outweigh the cons, as using Cloudflare’s infrastructure is one of the fastest in the world and the website will be only static.

Implementation

After successfully purchasing the domain, I decided on hosting the website Cloudflare Pages because it offers unlimited bandwidth (not like it will ever hit though haha), having good performance (300+ edge locations) and having zero cold starts. In the future, I might consider using the domain for emails too (using hi@adamjl.com for example)

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