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Comment by tomkwok | Hacker News Reader

Freenom appears to be the company managing the (in)famous "free" ccTLD .tk

No, thanks.

http://www.freenom.com/en/aboutfreenom.html

Elaborate? I have dozens of freenom domains (not just .tk, but also the other free TLDs like .ga et al.). I don't use them for critical (or commercial) services, but I've never had any issues - they are free after all.

DotTK and now Freenom have been great enablers for many smaller hobby sites. Get free webspace from bplaced, domain from freenom and CDN from CloudFlare and you have a pretty decent, ad-free infrastructure for a quick-and-dirty web project. A scratchpad solution basically.

Anyhow, that doesn't change the fact that the above DNS is still way too slow to be useful in the first place, at least from here.

> DotTK and now Freenom have been great enablers for many smaller hobby sites. Get free webspace from bplaced, domain from freenom and CDN from CloudFlare and you have a pretty decent, ad-free infrastructure for a quick-and-dirty web project. A scratchpad solution basically.

Agreed. But never use free .tk domains for anything serious. DotTK is notoriously for deleting domains registered for free from a user's account without any notification to the user as soon as the domain gets some amount of traffic according to many reports online.

I know of exactly one site which had a .tk TLD. Here’s why they switched to a .com:

http://tailsteak.com/archive.php?num=388

“tailsteak.com

Alright, so I'm finally fed up with Tokelau.

Don't get me wrong, it's a nice island, but they just aren't answering my mail.

I suppose most of you have noticed, by now, the fifteen-second ads that present you with beautiful women and fish when you surf to tailsteak.tk. Those are not my ads. I do not obtain revenue from them. Tokelau's domain name referral service just started putting them up there without so much as a by-your-leave. I have contacted their tech support and enquired if, perhaps, they might consider removing them for customers willing to pay a certain amount. They have not responded.

Of course, I have had access to tailsteak.com for some time now. So henceforth, I will be directing my viewers there. It's the same site, the same host, and, in truth, the .tk address has been sending you there for months. But now it's official. Note the change in title graphic:

tailsteak.com”

Indeed. And when you can get a domain you actually own for 99 cents (sometimes free, with offers) and a VPS for a few dollars per year, why bother with free domains or free hosting anyway.

I get the impression he's upset they took a freemium model and wants them to literally give him domains for free. Common sense would tell you that's unsustainable.

Never heard of bplaced before. What's the catch? How are they able to offer free hosting?

There's a free tier and a paid tier. The free tier has 2GB of space, limited number of FTP accounts and limited PHP functions (file sockets, cURL are disabled). You can basically run a Wordpress instance, but not a complex application. The bandwidth is also shared. These limits don't exist in the paid tiers.

But if you really just want to publish a smaller PHP app (they give you a MySQL DB, too), this is perfect. Combined with CloudFlare, the performance is more than good enough.

Edit: Another major factor is their scope. They are only somewhat internationalized, the english translation is more than lacking. Plus they have only 50k users (you have to login to the admin panel every 3 months or your account will be frozen, then slowly removed).

Edit 2: Their FAQ btw. explicitly states that you are allowed to create multiple accounts. I have had two accounts for a little over 3 years now, and they are working great. Their nameservers can be a tad slow if you add an external domain, but at least that's a free feature.

The mention of bplaced brought me waaay back. I used them for free hosting before I had a proper server of my own.

Unless they've changed, it's 000webhost but better: less known, faster, and no accounts getting cancelled without reason. No catch. Just like HN is free (and free of ads, despite how much traffic it must generate), this webhosting is free.

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