Dot.tk provides absolutely free domain names, but what do you get? Where’s the catch?
At first glance, .TK doesn’t seem too bad. You’ll have to give your email address which isn’t too bad.
Dot TK domains work by forwarding people to your real website. It redirects your traffic in a frame so the website address at the top will always literally say my-web-address.tk instead of my-web-address.tk/home or my-web-address.tk/post, etc.
You can also use dot TK domain names with your own DNS servers, which means that your website could say my-web-address.tk instead of simply redirecting to my-web-address.blogspot.com
And, dot TK domain names are absolutely free. Literally. As in, you don’t need to give any credit card information to get a domain name and you don’t pay a cent.
So, what’s the catch?
Well, when you register a .tk free domain name, you don’t legally own the domain name, you can’t sell or transfer the domain name, and you must have 25 hits per 90 consecutive days to keep the domain name. (Otherwise it gets released to the next person who wants to register the dot.tk domain name.)
If you’re starting up a website, do you really want to risk not owning the virtual land you’re building on? You could spend time building a web presence at your-domain-name.tk only to find that your web traffic drops and you lose the domain name because you didn’t meet your quota.
It’s a great place to start if you’re a kid, but if you’re serious about your website, you’ll probably want to be serious about your domain name as well.
If you want to pay to be the legal owner of a .tk domain name, it starts at $6.95 per domain name per year (if you’re willing to pay $62.55 for 9 years up front). The smallest amount you can pay is $19.90 USD for 2 years, which works out to be $9.95 per domain name per year.
If you’re going to pay $9.95 for a domain name, you might as well get a .com domain name for $8.99 per year from 1&1 Internet. Let’s be honest. If you want to be taken seriously on the net, you’ll want a .com domain name.
