4 ms·

Note that freenom is known for blocking free domains until users pay up once there's a bit of traffic. I thought it was bullshit until it happened to me.

noirscape 4y ago
Doesn't even have to be a lot of traffic. They just quietly flag your account after a while. I used their TLDs specifically to host high school projects like a decade ago. Suddenly, overnight, the DNS got updated and the account got "suspended" (thankfully only after the high school projects were done and over with). I knew it was suspended because while I seemingly wasn't allowed to iterate over the domains list, I was able to see the total amount of domains I had a registration for. Making an alternate account to try and see if they unregistered the domain (and to see if I could rerequest it) showed them selling the domain for ~$6. They get away with this due to some clause in their TOS that says that they're the owners of the domain and are just leasing it to you. I'm not sure if that's in-line with broader ICANN rules surrounding domain owner rights (iirc they've actually been suspended a couple times because of this sorta stint), but the company are complete scumbags.
- zinekeller 4y ago
  > I'm not sure if that's in-line with broader ICANN rules surrounding domain owner rights. Doesn't matter, they're ccTLDs, and if the countries-in-question didn't require that Freenom assign the names to actual users. ICANN is irrelevant here, period.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    ICANN iirc still has a group that can tell ccTLD registrars to get their shit together and if the company also handles gTLDs (which iirc freenom does), they can still make that a bureaucratic nightmare for them. It's not one of those things where they can outright say "you can't do that", but it is one of those things where it's "if you don't cooperate we'll make your life hell in other ways".
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
They also promise to notify you before your domain expires, but don't, and only allow you to renew free domains shortly before expiry. I think they also may disable/release your domain, also without warning, if your web server serves errors. If you need a throwaway domain for some joke project, sure, but they make their free domains as hard to use as possible to get you to pay, and once you pay, you might as well pay any of the more competent (and more likely to still be around tomorrow) competitors. My current go-to "I need to host this somewhere with a reasonable name" is Cloudflare with its pages.dev service. You can just upload a ZIP file and get free hosting and a something.pages.dev subdomain.

noirscape 4y ago

Doesn't even have to be a lot of traffic. They just quietly flag your account after a while. I used their TLDs specifically to host high school projects like a decade ago. Suddenly, overnight, the DNS got updated and the account got "suspended" (thankfully only after the high school projects were done and over with). I knew it was suspended because while I seemingly wasn't allowed to iterate over the domains list, I was able to see the total amount of domains I had a registration for. Making an alternate account to try and see if they unregistered the domain (and to see if I could rerequest it) showed them selling the domain for ~$6. They get away with this due to some clause in their TOS that says that they're the owners of the domain and are just leasing it to you. I'm not sure if that's in-line with broader ICANN rules surrounding domain owner rights (iirc they've actually been suspended a couple times because of this sorta stint), but the company are complete scumbags.

zinekeller 4y ago
> I'm not sure if that's in-line with broader ICANN rules surrounding domain owner rights. Doesn't matter, they're ccTLDs, and if the countries-in-question didn't require that Freenom assign the names to actual users. ICANN is irrelevant here, period.
- noirscape 4y ago
  ICANN iirc still has a group that can tell ccTLD registrars to get their shit together and if the company also handles gTLDs (which iirc freenom does), they can still make that a bureaucratic nightmare for them. It's not one of those things where they can outright say "you can't do that", but it is one of those things where it's "if you don't cooperate we'll make your life hell in other ways".

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago

They also promise to notify you before your domain expires, but don't, and only allow you to renew free domains shortly before expiry. I think they also may disable/release your domain, also without warning, if your web server serves errors. If you need a throwaway domain for some joke project, sure, but they make their free domains as hard to use as possible to get you to pay, and once you pay, you might as well pay any of the more competent (and more likely to still be around tomorrow) competitors. My current go-to "I need to host this somewhere with a reasonable name" is Cloudflare with its pages.dev service. You can just upload a ZIP file and get free hosting and a something.pages.dev subdomain.