I’ve searched the internet for minutes, talked to AIs to get help, and all that, and I still have not found anything. I don’t want to give my phone number, address, nor credit card. All the results talk about subdomains (I don’t want those!), free domains bundled with paid hosting packages, and Freenom (it doesn’t even work anymore). And the only sites that might be possible are not in English and aren’t detected by Google Translate!
If you know of any solution, please tell me. I am getting tired of subdomains. I wanted to see if biz.nf with their free .co.nf domain would work for me, but they require my address and phone number to sign up.
All these conditions rule out pretty much every free domain platform that doesn’t force hosting:
Freenom
names.co.uk (they offer free .co.uk domain but require phone number and address)
As you were already told, no. Free domain providers that offer fully-free domains just don’t exist.
It’s not free to own a TLD, and those who do own one don’t provide free access, that just leads to abuse that can become uncontrolled really fast, and if you don’t charge for the domain, that makes it quite hard to hire staff to manage all of that
I was thinking of getting a .uk.to subdomain at FreeDNS, but I don’t think that will work because my router keeps blocking the parent domain. .uk.to looks more professional than even .rf.gd, but I had troubles because:
There are no instructions on how to change your nameservers
To make changes to your domains you have to copy some text for “security” which half the time is not readable.
In order to change your nameservers in FreeDNS, you need to contact their staff. And the security text you are referring to, I believe it is a CAPTCHA. We can do nothing about it. You should Complain it to FreeDNS not us.
As was pointed out to you before, that’s not really free. You have to buy hosting from that company, and pay for it on an annual basis. Also the domain is only included for one year, after which you have to pay for it anyways.
Although that really is free it’s only for one year, and the .au extension is only available if you’re in Australia.
10-15 years ago, there were a lot more options for free (sub) domains. But basically every single provider that was popular then is gone now.
And the reasons are almost always the same:
It’s nearly impossible to run a healthy business providing free domain names. It does cost money to provide a free service, and nobody wants to get a premium package for a subdomain.
Rampant abuse from people registering the subdomains in bulk and using them to spam and scam.
The same challenges also apply to free hosting to some degree, but premium web hosting makes a lot more sense than a premium subdomain, and if we host the website content, we have a lot more options to control the content being shown on it.
It makes sense that free domain providers want your credit card number of phone number: those are a lot harder to obtain in bulk than email addresses and are a much more effective way to limit the number of domains people can register and effectively unroot spammers.
I completely agree that it’s frustrating that no free options exist and that they are not particularly privacy friendly. But providers just don’t have that many options.
Looks like the .rf.gd thing will continue for months! .rf.gd is the shortest subdomain I can get, I prefer (two letter).(two letter) subdomains over (three/four/five/six/seven/eight/nine/ten letter).(three letter) subdomains
I found —.cc, but although not requiring phone number nor credit card, to get your free domain you need to complete one of a few weird tasks. Told their support about it.
I took at a look at it, that place just screams “survey scam”- site’s that make promises for you to be given free stuff by filling out surveys (or occasionally other actions, like buying certain products) but never actually deliver. Like I said before:
If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Nobody is going to give you 100GB of web space (something that the site you linked to offered) for free.
Removed the URL from your post because that is clearly a scam. Verisign charges about $10 for a .com every year, and there is absolutely no way in the universe to avoid that.
The company you shared is making their money back somehow, whether that be forcing you to buy a premium plan, renew for more then a year, selling your data, installing malware on you device, running a phishing scam, etc, that domain is not free.
