Fortunately, I’ve worked as a sys-admin at several past jobs, and so have gotten pretty familiar with setting up domain names and such. In any case, it’s very easy. Go to your favorite domain registrar (I use Hover, and type your desired name into the big search box. They’ll tell you whether you can have that domain.

Unfortunately, chances are, unless you have chosen a deliberately mis-spelled name for your company (cough tumblr cough), you’ll find that your first choice is probably taken. In fact, I was in exactly this situation. My company was named “Redwood Labs”, and I found I faced a few different choices:

1. Rename the company to something available (redwoodsoftwareco.com)
2. Use a common abbreviation (redwlabs.com)
3. Use a hyphen between words (redwood-labs.com)
4. Choose a different top-level-domain (redwoodlabs.co)

Of these, I choose #3, redwood-labs.com. In my case, I knew my product name would be something else, and that I was going to register a different domain name for that. Therefore, it was less important to get a short, simple, easy-to-pronounce domain name. As I’ll talk about later, it was much more involved to find a domain name for the product itself.