[Minor49er]

Many years ago, there used to be http://www.tk/. They would let you register free domains (which I think technically were actually subdomains, but I'm really not sure). You could point these to anywhere online and it would maintain your [whatever].tk URL in the address bar. I remember hosting some pages on Geocities and using .tk to make it look "authentic" since it appeared to be self-hosted, which was 1337.

It seems that the service now redirects to a site called Freenom where you can still get .tk names, but they appear to be priced based on the length and whether or not the domain contains known words or phrases (though some free ones are apparently still available if you don't mind having a gibberish name)

[colejohnson66]

> which I think technically were actually subdomains, but I'm really not sure

IIRC, anything that isn’t the TLD is a subdomain. It’s just that we typically think of a subdomain as starting at the third-level. So, for this site, news is the subdomain of ycombinator.com, but also, ycombinator is a subdomain of com.

[daniel-cussen]

> It seems that the service now redirects to a site called Freenom where you can still get .tk names, but they appear to be priced based on the length and whether or not the domain contains known words or phrases (though some free ones are apparently still available if you don't mind having a gibberish name)

I consider that virtuous, and smart. Short domains must cost more than long domains. They're more valuable. Words must cost more than gibberish. But there were domains available, right? Didn't have to bang out twenty minutes finding something you liked that wasn't taken?

[unsafecast]

Freenom used to give these out for free as well (along with everything else in the “High Value” section). I had some that I used to play with, but I haven't checked if I can keep renewing for free.

[kvetching]

Ahh the good old .tk domain It could bypass URL filters on online games such as Runescape, giving scammers endless victims