Disclaimer

If you can afford a .com or .ca domain for $10 - $12 a year, then this article is not for you. If you're someone who is new to domain and DNS management, then perhaps there is something that may interest you.

Let's get this straight, nonetheless : Owning a domain comes at a price. A yearly 'fee' of some sort. And there are many hidden layers of where this money actually goes to (which we'll not discuss herein). Among all this havoc and economical chains and trains, you can finally get rid of your strains - even if it's for a limited time.

About Freenom

Have you heard of Freenom ?

Maybe, maybe not. I myself wasn't so sure about its services till a few weeks hanging off the end of September 2022.

Usually there are ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) that are represented by two English letters associated with each nation in the world. Canada has .ca, United Kingdom has .uk, Bangladesh has .bd, Tuvalu has .tv and so on. Apparently a few handful of such domains can be acquired for free!

Thanks to Freenom, a domain vendor, you can register domains with the following 'endings' : .gq, .cf, .ml, .ga, .tk.

The catch?

Well, for starters, their website isn't very fluid and polished as you might expect. Free stuff is rarely presented in a high quality, anyways. However, thankfully a Hungarian friend of mine, Lenr, explained on a section of his website how to properly utilize and exploit Freenom to successfully register domains freely.

This article is merely a refurbished version of his original procedures.

Using Freenom

1. Head over here and enter a domain name to see if it exists. You can also pre-register an account in advance (you'll need it).
2. Use the smaller 'checkout' button instead of the big green tick mark button to continue.
3. Select '12 months free' from the drop-down menu. It's usually set to '3 months free' by default, but why waste your opportunity? Choose the maximum duration that is offered for free.
4. If you see any errors, you need to either verify your account's email address/phone number OR you can just hit this link and locate your domains.
5. Congratulations! You now own a free tier domain for 1 year.

I'm not sure what happens when the domain expires. But I'll be sure to update this article by September 2023 (when my ones begin to expire). Truthful experiences are more reliable than speculated estimations, right?

Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoy your life now! Have fun registering domains. Or maybe read another article about the basics of domain/DNS management.