I had the chance to dine with Gary Jones of BlueFur.com on Saturday, along with 10 other dot com moguls and dot com moguls in the making (I’m looking at you Sally). If you’re interested in that pho (pronounced “fuh”, it is a Vietnamese rice noodle cooked in super hot soup) experience, check out this post, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Today, I’ll be discussing the name that Gary chose for his web hosting and domain registration service: BlueFur.

Before it was BlueFur, Gary’s business was called Monsterhosting.ca. He appeared to be doing perfectly fine for himself when he was suddenly hit with some “legal pressure” from a large American corporation, telling him that he couldn’t use the Monster moniker. As part of the settlement, Gary can’t tell us what company this was, but it wasn’t Monster Cable or Monster.com, in case you’re wondering. Whatever the case, Monsterhosting.ca needed a new name and Gary decided on BlueFur (so that he could keep that whimsical blue mascot).

Personally, I like the name change. It is a lot more distinctive than Monster Hosting, and has a very web-like feel to it. Kind of along the same lines as an Amazon, Yahoo, or Google. These are names of companies that probably wouldn’t have made a name for themselves, so to speak, as a standard brick-and-mortar type of business. The same can be said about BlueFur. What the name does evoke, however, is an image of the fur-covered car from Dumb and Dumber. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

While the BlueFur mascot is cute and all, I think that it bears too much of a resemblance to “Sulley” from Monsters Inc.. For this reason, I fear that Gary may once again be treading on thin ice against a large American corporation. The last thing you want is to have Disney and/or Pixar knocking at your door, serving you with a big fat lawsuit.

I have to comment on the tagline that is associated with BlueFur.com. Right now, it’s “Experience the Legend”, perhaps trying to evoke connections to other mythical beasts like the Yeti, Sasquatch, and Bigfoot. I don’t think it fits with the business of web hosting, and especially when you have such a light and uplifting name (and mascot) as BlueFur. It may even be better to drop the tagline altogether and simply extend the company name to BlueFur Hosting or something similar. If there must be a line attached, then maybe Gary should opt for “Let the fur fly” or “Fuzzy web love for everyone” (okay, maybe not the latter).

All in all, BlueFur is a great name to build a brand around as it is clearly distinctive and will surely separate itself from the crowd. The tagline has got to go, and the cuddly mascot may have to be reconsidered at some point though.

If you want to get yourself a free domain name, review BlueFur’s new name too! Check out this post for additional details. Just bear in mind that the offer is limited to the first fifty participants


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