It terminates after reaching a gateway with internal IP address, which would seem to indicate that something on your network, or your PC itself, is terminating your connection, or your DNS resolver is preventing it from resolving.
That too would seem to indicate a DNS issue. There are other examples of forum members running into this problem.
This happens because, unfortunately, the free hosting gets abused quite a bit and some ISPs and DNS providers will block entire base domains for the free subdomains.
That seems to be exactly what’s happening here, though I admit I’m not sure why using a VPN doesn’t bypass it in your case. This can also be caused by software on the PC, such as an antivirus, preventing the connection for the same reason.