It has been a shaky start this year for this blog. The free domains that I had been free-boarding over the past 3 years seems to have met their end, and it wasn’t even in 2024.

To start with, I had been using the services of Freenom. They are a domain provider, who offered free domains in 5 selected suffixes over the years. They were

• .tk
• .ml
• .ga
• .cf
• .gq

Over the past 3 years, I had used .ml domain twice by renewing. Last year, I had forgotten to renew the .ml suffixed domain, and was subsequently forced to choose a new one. It was then I switched to .cf suffixed domain. A year later, and the same feat has repeated over again. Except that it has been almost a week since the new year, and I myself didn’t have an idea about the renewal date. I didn’t receive a reminder for the same from Freenom. I do remember receiving a reminder back in 2022.

With that done, it was through human intervention that I came to know about the expiry of the domain. Later this evening, I visited the freenom.com page, and was greeted by an unresponsive webpage at login. Few minutes of workarounds later, I finally was able to login. The next hurdle came on the domain availability checker. I had to briefly check it with Inspect tool to know if the button was functioning properly. What followed was a service notice from Freenom that their domain services were “temporarily unavailable”. Here is where the suspicion mounted. After a quick Google search, I came across a post which mentioned that this particular service notice has existed since January 2023 - probably after I had registered the .cf suffixed domain. Guess I was a bit lucky with the time of registration.

Now, with the option of a free domain being robbed off, I began my next expedition on the search engine. Instead of going for the domain providers directly, I tried to search for discussions on popular forums. There, I got to know that many cheap domain providers exist, and GoDaddy should not be considered as an option.

After filtering through the user opinions, one option looked reliable. Cloudflare - a popular DNS provider and web hosting service, which also operated a domain registering service. Many positive comments were centered around it’s DNS security services that could prevent spoofing and a WHOIS privacy service too (though I have no idea what that is). I cycled through the suffix options, and picked the smallest and cheapest(?) suffix available, which is the .cc suffix.

So, after many years, many months, many days, I finally had to pay the price to keep the custom domains going. But it was quite a valuable experience to know about the quirks in domain business and why we shouldn’t be buying any stuff from GoDaddy.

Additional note: I also came across a service called Namecheap, which was blocked by the ISP for an expired security certificate.