A) You get what you pay for.<p>B) The top-level domains offered here are absolute garbage and are generally seen as problematic. See A.<p>C) Freenom has a lot of power as the holder of its namespace. Don't like that? Bring it up with ICANN.<p>Because the Internet is built around a lot of abstractions that only make sense in light of the historical context at the time the technology was originally adopted, it really doesn't lend itself to being friendly to newbies. These people are actively preyed upon by a hostile industry full of shady operators.
Oh funny story. I have a .tk domain with freenom (used to be with dot.tk before the Dutch invaded, I guess) that was a free domain and I broke the ToS by not setting an A record for it. Unfortunately for me I had an MX record pointed to my email and some low value accounts registered to it that were now locked out to me.<p>Determined to get this domain back, I tried all email contact methods and this failed. Never once received a response to an email asking for help. However, I did search around and discovered a phone number.<p>This began months of me calling this number and speaking to the same Dutch woman asking about unsuspending this domain so I could purchase it. Every once in awhile I called her back during Dutch business hours (so late night for me) and had a conversation with her about it. Finally after around 4 months of persistence I got the domain back and was able to register it.
From the article: <i>"When you get the domain, it will be added to your account but when your website starts to get a lot of traffic, Freenom will remove the domain from your account without notifying you and then put it on sale. You won't be able to get the domain back unless you pay a fee."</i><p>Now, where else can that business model be applied? You could let people post videos for free, and when they get enough traffic, ads are added. That might be a successful business.
I don't mean to complain, but where are the details? I have two (very low traffic, so likely to never have come close to hitting this) domains at FreeNom because they're the easiest way to register emoji/punycode domains in obscure gTLDs.<p>How does FreeNom know how much traffic your domain is getting, especially if you've set up your own DNS servers (which you can do on free domains)?<p>There are no particulars here and I am very curious to know how this popped up.
Freenom free domains only grant you usage rights. The registrant listed in WHOIS is still their company. You don't own the domain.<p>I have a few Freenom domains, but they are only for short-term use (e.g. try out a new ACME client). Nobody should use a Freenom domain on a serious website.
If you need a free domain, I would recommend to rather use a free subdomain from <a href="https://dynv6.com/" rel="nofollow">https://dynv6.com/</a> which has a featureful managment UI and API.
I run an email forwarding service for custom domain (<a href="https://hanami.run" rel="nofollow">https://hanami.run</a>) and I have to ban the usage of those “free” domains. they are a frequent amount of spam. those users also never paid. none of them.<p>So i ended up just prevent signed up with those tlds or add those tlds into our system
I use freenom for a small website I run, they're definitely weird. That said, I've never paid them anything. Freenom combined with 000webhost was the perfect tech stack to host a small website for a friends gaming guild. Weird stuff happens, but I've not paid a dime and I don't think anyone got malware. I keep regular backups of everything and if it goes down I can just rehost elsewhere and let my friends know.
Ah, this again. Freedom is fine, it's just that people don't read the terms and conditions before clicking "I agree".<p>I have a .tk domain that I bought in 2008, never had a problem, and I've been using that for all sort of things (including running a mail server).<p>The thing is, you're supposed to read the terms and conditions before using something, AS FOR EVERYTHING.<p>When I registered (and later bought) the domain the terms and conditions clearly stated that you do not get legal ownership of the domain with the free offering (which is more akin to a lease than to a registration).
This is nothing new.<p>I ran into this in the 1990s. I had to basically arm-wrestle one of these organizations to get a domain released. I think they gave it to me, because I made such a pain out of myself, that it wasn't worth it.
I, too, once had a domain from them. The site got zero popularity (had only a static "hello world"), then suddenly got removed with no response from support. Suspected it was some glitch and since it was free then thought nobody is actually looking at it. Never dug further.<p>Interestingly enough the domain is online again with apparently legitimate (no spam or adds) content.
I have been suspecting that freenom is a scam for some time. I used several free domain names for some testing that I did and although one of them did have a website up for it (which is required according to their terms of service), The domain was reclaimed after one year and I would have had to pay money to renew it.<p>Honestly though I have to admit that I wasn't surprised and I didn't go posting on the internet about it. I already knew that it is impossible to get something for nothing these days. Especially domain names! These days if I want to throw away domain name I'll go to name cheap and spend $0.88 on one.
I have some experience with Freenom. In fact after seeing a Show HN for Mailoji (single character emoji emails) I found the TLD .gq and registered a number of county flag single emoji domains.<p>In my experience it is not a total scam at all, rather they offer a freemium business model which is unique in the domain space.<p>Like many other freemium services the free tier is limited and just a means of getting you to upgrade. For example the free domain registration is limited to a maximum term of 12 months, they do not allow you to transfer ownership of the free domain registrations and they even froze my account after registering maybe a few dozen single character emoji domains in rapid succession.<p>I was actually so please with registering single character country flag emoji domains I paid the fee to upgrade and unlocked all the features.<p>I don’t think I can use emojis on the HN comment but for reference I registered (all .gq extensions): Cuba Flag, Israel Flag, Palestinian Flag, Ireland flag, South African Flag, Nigerian Flag and a few other middle eastern county flags.<p>As a side note the Mailoji service used the official Kazakhstan (.kz) registrar and I was interested and registered two single character country flag emoji domains with them (including Russia Flag) and they took that domain from me and gave it to a Developer in Kazakhstan that is clearly connected with employees that work for the registrar.
So I actually purchased .tk domain when it was still dot.tk. Unfortunately it switched to freenom. Since then it's horrible experience, is there any possibility to move the domain?<p>Since I paid it I technically own them like a normal domain, but I just don't want to deal with them and their broken UI.
I believe this is known. But no harm in making it re-known.<p>Trying to register a throwaway domain on Freenom a few months ago (trying over several days) it was impossible. Quite literally impossible, not from UI, it just didn't let me log in.