Introduction
Obtaining a free web domain is not that hard now, but you should know that this is not the recommended solution for any webpage. It is commonly known that a paid solution is more reliable than a free web domain, as the features given by those companies are important for a page. However, for a personal blog that is only visited by your friends, a free web domain is more than enough.
New webmasters start with a free web domain, just to understand the basic principles of managing a page, and to learn their way around the internet. Later, they would require some advanced features such as newsletters and emails based on Web 2.0 technology, and in this case, they will need to switch to shared hosting. However, since then, let’s see how you can make your own free web domain.
History
Start by searching the websites offering this facility. There are thousands of such services, but the most interesting of them are Wordpress and BlogSpot from Google. Even if they are paid solutions with limited features, you can still customize your page with lots of themes and widgets. While BlogSpot has the advantage of being Google friendly, Wordpress will give you a free web domain with many features that could be useful. You can have free spam protection, even a newsletter, and the possibility to change the appearance of your site if you want. It is a matter of personal opinion to choose one service or the other, but you should know that 90 % of the free web domains are hosted on one of those two platforms.
Features
The major disadvantage of a free web domain is that it will always have the name of your hosting provider. In other words, a site hosted free at Wordpress will always have the name yoursite.wordpress.com, and a site hosted at BlogSpot will always be called yoursite.blogspot.com. Well, it seems like this is going to change, and those two services will be available soon. This way, you will have your own free web domain hosted at .com. It remains to be seen if this is possible, and we are also wondering if the sites that are already hosted with the name .blogspot.com and .wordpress.com could be transformed in simple .com pages.
Tips and comments
It is not always recommended to host your free web domain with the same provider, if you decide to go for a paid solution. In other words, if you decide to transform your free web domain mysite.wordpress.com in mysite.com, it is not necessary to go for the paid hosting solution offered by Wordpress, even if this is possible. The same goes with BlogSpot from Google. Don’t worry, as Google is also friendly with pages hosted at other providers, and they will not be “angry” just because you are not using their services anymore. Moreover, you will be able to keep the same platform and the same appearance for the site, and even to improve it with the extra facilities put at your disposal by your new hosting company.
