What is the best free domain name?

How do I get a 100% free domain?

My first thought is to buy a domain from GoDaddy, but I've heard that they're the biggest abusers of free domains.

What are some good alternatives? If you want a completely free domain, then your only option is to get a free domain from a registrar, not a hosting provider like GoDaddy. The largest registrars, like gandi.net and Namecheap, offer free domains.

As for a free web hosting provider, there are a few. They vary in how easy they make it to build websites, though. If you want something that's extremely easy, check out SiteGround. If you want something more powerful, but with a bit more effort, check out Bluehost.

If you want to stick with a hosting provider, then you can't go wrong with GoDaddy. It has one of the best customer service departments, and it offers one of the largest selection of features for free.

While not 100% free, you can get a domain for free if you have a good idea. Create a domain at Godaddy.com Buy a hosting plan at Godaddy.com Put your name in as the owner. Wait for someone to register your domain for you. After that, your domain is yours and you can do whatever you want with it. (Disclaimer: I haven't tried this method myself, I'm just giving you an idea). GoDaddy is notorious for their abuse of free domains. We moved our site to a different registrar (Registro.com) and we've been very happy with them. The process is very simple and they do not charge you any money to register a domain. They do however have a number of features that are very useful.

I would recommend trying them out first. They will be able to give you more information on what is available.

Can you get a .com domain for free?

It's a question many people ask.

If I give you a dollar, can you give me a dollar's worth of my services for the next two days? This used to be true. Years ago, anyone who wanted to host their own site used to have a company called AOL (America Online) or Compuserve (CompuServe) for one thing.

These big companies had a web site or e-mail service and charged a bunch of money to get one themselves. This allowed them to own everything - their own domain name, their own content (ie your blog posts). The people at AOL made money when they sold email accounts (pre-Google). That's how they paid for their operation and content.

So for several years there, domain names were available for free. They gave them away (usually at the root domain, .com) to companies that needed them.

As new content became accessible on the World Wide Web through the use of HTML, sites began to appear. But in the beginning, you had to pay for access to your content if it was online. And a big, centralized company would host your site on their server. They would charge you monthly fees. As these corporations grew up, more of their properties became accessible as time went on.

However, this process for obtaining an account with one of these companies only has about 100-200 years of history. When I became a real blogger, one of my blogs was at .org. Well before blogs became a common thing, someone was interested in the domain of the blog and paid to own that domain. This person could get a lot of traffic if they promoted the domain. You know who those people were because every dot org started out as a .tv or .movie domain - or in other words a domain which might end in a letter not on the top line of the keyboard like a .com domain.com was always the official, approved and controlled domain name. And for many decades, all .com domains have been reserved and controlled by Verisign, Microsoft or GoDaddy. Which is why if you get a .org you have to know who you're dealing with and sign a contract. Not everyone wants to do that though!