Opinions/ideas please=> free domain reg. ?

[smallhagrid]

Paying around $20 a year for domain reg. gets tiring I think.

Godaddy usually charges about that much on average, and has very good live support 24/7 - but:

For regular folks who don't have loads of $$, this cost wears thin after a year or 2 and price increases.

Having tried other registrars all I found was that they were not as good.

The best-worst example EVER was one&one, which actually cost me a domain that I wanted to keep.

So - I looked around for free domain reg. and have been testing the ones I found with interesting results.

None are true TLDs.

They are all subdomains like yourdomain.cu.cc, but for free I think that is OK when they work.

Also, from what I've seen none have the reliability of a paid TLD with Godaddy, but for the most part they are not terrible either.

What is neat (IMO) is that all one must do to have a free web presence & their own domain-based emails is to get a free domain & point it at some good, free hosting.

That all having been said here is what I've found so far=>

These few seem to work OK, most of the time
http://www.registry.cu.cc/myaccount.php
https://uni.me/login.php
http://freeavailabledomains.com/en/
http://www.freenom.com/en/index.html

These 2 say they are in beta and do have too much downtime IMO:

http://www.vo.to/index.php?lng=en
http://www.do.to/index.php?lng=en

These 2 are krappy & totally useless IMO:

http://www.freedomain.co.nr/

http://codotvu.com/

Another that I found is http://www.smartdots.com/, but they seem to be down for maint. all the time so I have not tried them out yet.

Another whole approach is with a whole sub-domain of this domain:

http://www.eu.org/

But it seems quite complicated and the usefulness of it is unclear to me ??

Has anyone here got suggestions for any other free domain reg. service that has been good, bad or otherwise to share here ??

Thanks.

[pintas]

Thank you for your post.

That smartdots.com sure looks great, but still on maintenance :(

[pintas]

Ok, found some more (all from smartdots) working:

http://europnic.com

http://homenic.com

http://alpennic.com

http://cydots.com

http://unonic.com

http://tipdots.com - This one is on maintenance too

http://nic.ch.vu

http://nic.de.vu

http://hitnic.com

http://popnic.com

http://aliasdomains.com

http://joynic.com

Weird how they offer so much for free, no?

Still... i wanted a xx.xx domain from smartdots :P

[smallhagrid]

That is an amazing list Pintas - thanks for sharing it !!

Now that you shared so many different offers from smartdots...

I searched on 'smartdots free domain' and found more that I didn't find before...

Here is a little more info for anyone who may be interested=>

http://www.getfreedomain.name/- this is a list of many with very good details about them.

http://www.revealingthestuffs.com/13-websites-to-register-your-free-domain/

[pintas]

Niiiice! Thanks man.

I just put a bot to see when smartdots comes out of maintenance. I'm obsessed in having a xx.xx domain :P

[smallhagrid]

I think when it shows the xx.xx domain thing that is because it is down...will be curious to see what comes up there sometime...?!

[pintas]

Damn!!! I think you're right! :o