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Comment by dmitry_lyfar | Hacker News Reader

That's amazing that you remember using it under the old name Server Auditor. We realised it was not the best name for a product as it has this negative audit flavour. "OK", we thought and iterated on the name resulting in Termius. This time people (and even Google) started to confuse it with Terminus. "Jesus", we thought and worked on making Google understand it right. It worked with Google, but people still seem to like Terminus more. Now we're thinking to either fix people's perception or come up with a new name. How do you like the name, btw?

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I read your entire post word for word and read it as Terminus each time, not realizing I had it wrong until your comment.

Perhaps Termius is a fighting a bit much against the flow of "terminal"? FWIW terminus is also a word frequently used on transit ("Terminus station"), which is kind of cute.

I apologize! I've always called it Terminus... I only just now realized that's not how it's spelled. I honestly mean no offense. I've just always read it as Terminus. Termius isn't a bad name, I just read it as Terminus. Huh. Now I feel bad, because people constantly mispronounce my company's name and I have to correct them.

Not GP, but I did misread the submission title as ...Terminus... Seems more natural, for whatever reason, to me at least.

Is the problem that it's an existing trademark, or just that it's annoying to change again?

It probably doesn't matter if I misread it, search engines will take care of it as if a typo? (Same applies to anyone accurately searching for the name I misleading recommend them, too.)

Thanks! Yes, that's a bit annoying to change it again and communicate (and, possibly, confuse users even more). Agree, the search engines suggest Termius as a fix now, so we'll probably leave it as is.

I have to say, I don't like the name and confused it just like the other people.

But, perhaps you could do something with the capitalization of the name to make it more obvious:

"termiUS"

You could accentuate that effect with using a larger font for the last two letters.

Seems like one of the benefits is synchronization, so emphasizing US fits. And then you don't lose your hard fought Google ranking.

But, in any case, it's a great product and good luck!

Good point, we have another domain termi.us so we might alter the name just with a dot.

I also read the whole post as terminus until I saw your post here

I read the headline name as Terminus, as I guess 99% of others did as well. When I started reading the description I realized it’s Termius, and thought that’s an odd name that most people are never going to get unless they’re reminded of the spelling/pronunciation a few times. In my view, this is a poorer choice of name and branding. I don’t think you’ll ever see the day when everyone you encounter gets the name correctly on the first attempt.

Until this comment, in every usage of the name from headline to dozens of comments, I only saw “Terminus”.

Human brains are proven to error correct misspellings on the fly, and you are getting told by everyone your name is error corrected to something you’re saying it’s not. That’s a big deal.

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