At 14:20 1-12-00 -0800, veovix wrote:
>All this recent talk about free domain names, etc has got me
>wondering. Why the heck do people bother the fuss of "free" domain names
>when obtaining one outright is so much faster, easier & cheap?
Maybe because it isn't so cheap when you're not living in the US?
Most organizations offer domain registration for USD 35 per year. Assuming
you can get hosting for US$ 10 per month, that adds up to USD 155 per year.
That may be peanuts for the average American, but us foreigners also have
the exchange rate to reckon with. At the current rate, USD 155 = ~NLG 420.
Compare these figures to the net income of the average working-class guy
(say, a factory worker or an administrative clerk). Here in The
Netherlands, this guy earns ~NLG 25-30k net per year. I don't know exactly
how much his US counterpart earns, but I suppose it would be ~USD 25-30k
net per year. In other words, that "cheap" domain registration and hosting
is over 3.5 times as expensive for me as it would be for my US counterpart.
Now, I earn more than the abovementioned working-class guy, and I could
even afford those NLG 420 per year. Question is, however, is getting domain
registration and hosting worth NLG 420 to me? The answer: I'm not quite
sure it is. Would you still be happy to pay if getting those services would
cost you USD 420 per year instead of USD 155?
To add to the mayhem, I'm stuck to registering a .com, .net or .org domain.
I'd rather register a .nl domain, but I can't do that. Until recently, all
.nl domains were available to businesses only, not to private individuals.
It sounded promising a few months ago, when word got out that individuals
could register a .nl domain as of November 1st. Well, I can do that now,
but there's a catch. Let's say I would want to register the domain
vanbaardwijk.nl. Whoever is responsible for all this expected that there
would be multiple requests for the same domain name, so they decided to add
a 3-digit number to the URL. So, instead of getting vanbaardwijk.nl, I'd
get something like vanbaardwijk.123.nl -- so much for easy-to-remember
domain names... :(
An alternative is to use the web space your ISP offers, but that often gets
you an URL that's difficult to remember. That's where a free domain name
comes in. FREX, my ISP gives me 10 MB of web space, but the URL to that is
http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~j.vanbaardwijk (don't bother to look --
there's nothing of interest there). It's much easier to register
vanbaardwijk.com for free, and then use URL-forwarding.
>the sites that offer free services are neat in concept, but if you've been
>waiting since october for them to process your application...it cant be
>all it's cracked up to be
I've been waiting that long because they told me "it would take some time".
They forgot to mention that my application couldn't be processed because
their service isn't available in The Netherlands.
>Registering a Domain for your exclusive use is $20US per year. Thats it.
>The cost of dinner and a movie. Hosting is $10US per month..
Does anyone have any experience with NoMonthlyFees.com? Their offer: a
one-time fee of USD 200 and USD 35 annual thereafter. For that money you'll
get (among other things) 99.9% uptime, 200 MB web space, free domain name,
static IP address and unlimited e-mail accounts. Sounds very interesting,
although those USD 200 (~NLG 540) is quite a lot of money.
Jeroen
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