Free Web Hosting
What Kinds of Domains are Available With Free Web Hosting?
It is important to determine the extension you want for your domain before creating a page with one of the free web hosting services available. However, we are talking about a large number of domains available, but also about some extensions that are not offered by the free companies of this kind. Let’s see those extensions and what you must do to benefit of those domains with your free web hosting provider.
Common extensions available with the free web hosting companies
The free web hosting companies offer a limited number of extensions, and this is understandable. You must realize that hosting costs, and even if the company offers you this service free, they will pay hosting to their providers, or if they have their own servers, and they usually do, they will have to pay maintenance and upkeep for those servers. This is why they will only be able to offer common extensions and domains.
As your site is hosted with the respective free web hosting company, the name of your site will be your-chosen-domain.free-web-hosting.com. The .com extension is the most common with the free hosters, although other cheap extensions such as .net, .info or .org are also available. The expensive domains such as those hosted at .us, .co.uk or any other extension representing a country are usually not available with the free web hosting services. Again, it is a matter of costs, and those companies simply can’t afford to offer those domains free.
However, even with those limited numbers of domains available, you still have many options at your disposal.
.com – it was once used by major companies and corporations, being the most expensive type of domain. As time passed, the extension was used by more and more sites, and now it is the most common extension used by webmasters. In fact, you can even find free web hosting companies offering you a direct .com domain. This means that your site will not be named yoursite.provider.com, it will be named yoursite.com, and this is surely an advantage, as it eases optimization and maintenance for the site.
.net comes from “network” and it is commonly used by sites based on the niche of internet, communications and social media. It is a cheap extension, but the webmasters using this extension with the free web hosting services must know that SEO optimization is hard in this case, therefore they need to attract visitors with the relevance of the content more than using the common SEO techniques such as link building and social media marketing.
.org was first used by non-profit organizations, but it was extended to any type of organization. Today, the extension is available with the majority of free web hosting providers, and it is mostly used by webmasters that want to host a blog, a forum, or to create a community of people interested about the same topic.
.biz, .info and .pro are extensions that war added later, because there were only a few names available on the classic extensions.
What is the suited extension for your site?
It is recommendable to use the .com extension with the free web hosting company, as it is easily remembered by visitors. In case the domain of your choice is not available at .com, you can try other extensions. In case all those names are taken, you must use your imagination to create an interesting name for your site that was not used by anybody. If you don’t have any inspiration currently, you can find the specialized sites that will generate a name for you based on the keywords of your choice, and you can even check if those generated names are available as domains.
