Free Domain Registrations Take Off, Thanks to Tokelau

The age of free domain and sub-domain hosting is passé. What’s in vogue right now is free domain registration, as in you get to register a piece of digital property all your own for no cost. But there’s no free lunch on the internet, so there’s bound to be a catch, right? Well, yes and no…

Free your domain (Photo – Freedom Registry)

It depends on what you’re getting, how much control you have over it and what you can use it for.

For example, getting a free .blog domain from Google is not really a freebie domain.

It’s just something they let you use as long as you host it as a blog on their Blogger service.

That’s not much better than a yourname.blogspot.com kind of deal.

The best deal currently on offer is probably the .TK domain registration, which is entirely free with no quid pro quo. It’s the only country level domain you are going to get for free, because Tokelau’s Freedom Registry does not charge buyers for handing out .tk domains. I wonder what new ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé would say about this.

It was all started as a business idea by Joost Zuurbier fromAmsterdam, who convinced the Tokelauns it was a good idea and then convinced ICANN to allow a country-level domain for Tokelau, which covers all of 4 sq miles on three remote islands in thePacific Ocean.

Today, .tk is the third most popular country domain afterGermany’s .de domain and theUnited Kingdom’s .uk domain. There are already more than 9 million registered .tk domains. The registry is now so popular they are getting around a million more registrations each month.

The only requirement is that the domain should get at least 25 unique visitors every 90 days. The Freedom Registry makes its money by putting ads on expired domains that have been abandoned but still keep getting some residual traffic. If you do not want the ads then consider a godaddy source code to obtain a domain that you can do whatever you want with.  They may not be free but they can be obtained at a discount.