So, your a student thinking about getting one of those sexy [[free]] [[domain]]s from :

• .tech
• NameCheap
• or Name.com?

Or, a developer thinking about snagging a

• .ml
• .ga
• .gq

Etc domain for free?

Please, don't. While aside from automatic reregistration there are no shady terms, what it entails forever after the "trial" (all the listed offerings are ONE YEAR ONLY!) is a big pain. Here is a high level overview of what will happen

One: You get the domain

So, welcome! You just got your shiny new domain for free, perhaps aware of it's untimely experation, or perhaps not. You setup a website, all is well and good.

Two: You begin sharing

You bought the domain to get a presence on the web, and you work hard to get what you came for. You add links to your bio's, host your projects there, and consistently link people to project related files. Your still loving it, but without realizing it, you have become intertwined

Three: You try to back out

And the year is over, and it is time to reconsider your domain. You don't have another free year, so you go shopping. Because you are now paying, it's worth switching to one of the [[Good TLDs]] for little extra cost, at the tradeoff of a monumental increase in trust from the visitors, but one issue quickly manifests. You now have a digital trail pointing to your old, free domain. It's too big to know where it starts and ends, and your only two choices are to

Pay for two domains

Your old domain will redirect to the new one, and all new traffic will be at the new one from the start, but you want to keep your old one around for the visitors coming from parts of the trail you did not remember to modify to point to the new one.

Now your paying 2x what you could have been

Ditch the old one

Or, you could ditch the old one, leaving metric tons of dead links in your wake. You know how deadlinks feel to stumble across, and you certainly don't want to give someone else that fate

This was avoidable

Pay for the domain you want from the start, don't fall for this trap of getting stuck between two horrible options

See Also

• Link Rot on [[Wikipedia]]