Free Domain Names in 2026: What's Actually Free and What's a Trap

For years the answer to "where do I get a free domain" was Freenom. You picked a name, chose .tk, .ml, .ga, .cf or .gq and you had a domain for free.

That answer is dead. Meta sued Freenom in March 2023 over the phishing sites that lived on its domains. Freenom stopped taking new registrations, ICANN pulled its accreditation in November 2023 and in February 2024 the company said it was leaving the domain business. Researchers counted more than 12 million domains on its TLDs that stopped resolving.

So what's left in 2026? More than you'd think, as long as you know which kind of "free" you're getting.

Two kinds of free domain

A free top-level domain is a name like myproject.tk that you register yourself. These are close to extinct. The registries that gave them away either closed or started charging, mostly because free domains attracted spam and phishing faster than anyone could clean it up.

A free subdomain is a name under someone else's domain, like myproject.github.io. You don't own github.io, but your part of the name is yours and it comes with hosting or routing attached. This is where almost all the useful free options are now.

Free subdomains that work today

For static sites

• GitHub Pages gives you username.github.io and serves a static site from a repository. Free, with HTTPS.
• Cloudflare Pages gives you project.pages.dev with a generous free tier and builds from Git.
• Netlify and Vercel give you project.netlify.app and project.vercel.app. Their free plans are aimed at personal and hobby use, so read the terms before you put a business on them.

These are great when your project is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. They also work for frameworks the platform can build for you.

For developer identities

• is-a.dev hands out yourname.is-a.dev for personal developer sites. You open a pull request on its GitHub repository and the maintainers review it.
• js.org gives JavaScript projects hosted on GitHub Pages a project.js.org name, also through a pull request.

Both are community projects. They are free and well liked, but approval depends on volunteers and your use has to fit their rules.

For apps on your own server

This is the gap the options above don't cover. If you run a Node API, a Django app or a Docker container on a VPS, GitHub Pages can't help you and your choices used to be "share an IP address and port" or "buy a domain and set up Nginx and certbot".

That's why we built DomainDock. You get yourapp.digitalweb.host, point it at your server's IP and port and it's live over HTTPS in about a minute. We create the DNS record, the certificate is already in place at our gateway and we test the connection before anything is created. It's free: up to 10 projects with 5 domains each, no card.

The slow but real option

EU.org has offered free subdomains since 1996 and lets you point them at your own name servers, which almost nothing else free does. Approval is manual and can take a long time. Worth knowing about, not something to count on for a launch next week.

The traps

"Free domain with hosting"

Shared hosts often include a free domain with a yearly plan. The domain itself is real. The catch is the renewal: the hosting plan that cost $3 a month for the first term renews at two or three times that. Moving the domain away later is a chore. Check who is listed as the registrant. It should be you.

Cheap first year, expensive after

Some extensions sell for $1 or $2 in the first year and renew at $30 or more. That's not free, it's deferred. Look up the renewal price before you fall in love with a name.

Names nobody trusts

Several of the old free TLDs ended up on spam blocklists. Email from them lands in junk and some corporate networks block the sites outright. A free name that half your visitors can't open is worse than no name.

When to pay for a domain

A free subdomain is the right call for demos, staging servers, client previews, hackathon projects and anything you might throw away. It's also fine for a real product in its first weeks.

Buy your own domain when:

• you want email at the domain
• you expect other sites to link to you and want those links to last
• the project has a name people will remember and type

A .com costs around $10 to $12 a year at registrars that sell near cost, like Cloudflare Registrar. Students should check the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which has included a free first-year domain from a partner registrar.

You don't have to choose one forever. A common setup is a free digitalweb.host address while you build, then a bought domain when the project is ready, with the free address kept for staging.

Quick comparison

If your project runs on a server you control, claim a free custom domain on DomainDock and skip the registrar for now.