Free Domains: What Are They?

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Free domain names advertised online are not actually free. They are bundled with other services that cost money. ICANN regulates domain names and charges a fee of $0.20 USD per domain name sold. Companies can offer cheap domain names by bundling them with required packages, such as hosting, to make a profit.

Many people have seen advertisements on the internet for free domain names, which often seem too good to be true. After all, with most reputable companies offering domain names from $8 US Dollars (USD) to $15 USD, how can other companies offer free domain names with no strings attached? The short answer is that they can’t: while many companies may claim to offer free domain names, what they’re actually doing is bundling a domain name with other services, which cost money. This is a sense of gratuitousness that is used in the case of “free gift with purchase”.

Domain names are regulated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. ICANN accredits some domain name registrars for selling generic top-level domains, such as .com, .net, .org, and .mobi. Addon domains, which are country-specific, such as .uk or .tv, are managed by the country itself, which licenses its own domain name registrars. Depending on the domain suffix involved, the fees that absolutely have to be borne by the domain name registrar are different. However, since most of the domains sold are in the .com space, we’ll look into them.

If free domain names were to exist, at least one domain name registrar should expect to be able to give away domain names without any loss. In reality, however, every time a domain name registrar sells a domain name, you have to pay a fee of $0.20 US Dollars (USD) to ICANN. Also, with .com domains, they have to pay a maximum fee to VeriSign of $6.86 USD. At that price, it becomes easy to see why no domain name registrar could sell a .com domain for less than $7.06 USD without losing any money. On the other hand, a very cheap domain name registrar could sell a domain for something like $7.20 USD and still make a profit if the amount of domains sold is large enough.

Of course, outside of the .com domain space, the price can be even lower and still be profitable. With ICANN’s $0.20 USD fee, a .info domain name could sell for $1.99 USD and still make a hefty profit. And many other domain spaces have similarly low overhead. Even with these, however, giving away free domain names would still result in a loss of $0.20 USD per domain name for the company giving them away.

What allows free domain names to work is that the company bundles them with the required packages that a customer must purchase to get the domain name. If, for example, to receive your free domain you need to sign up for at least one year of hosting, where hosting is $9.95 USD every month, the domain name registrar makes about $120 USD every year from your hosting expenses , which means they can easily afford to give away a $7 USD domain name. Similarly, a business can sell a .com domain name for about $7.06 USD without requiring users to purchase additional packages, as long as they make those packages so visible that many customers will choose to purchase them, helping to increase their margin. overall profit.




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