I’ve been interested in web design and development for many years now, and have made tremendously slow progress in that time, stuttering along and learning how to do this or that, only to find that there’s a completely new way of doing everything that doesn’t require any effort, so I switch to learning that. Then I see an advert asking me to try out a new way of doing things that doesn’t require any effort, and I get into that, only to find that it’s not as pain-free as they suggested it would be. And before my disappointment at having abandoned my initial approach for the one in the advert, there’s an even newer thing that not only requires little or no effort, but the company offering you the new way actually pays you money to try their system out.

Then, of course, you find that the whole of the internet’s changed and the worldwide web is no longer abbreviated as “the web”, it’s become “web 2.0″. So, while I’ve been struggling, and largely failing, to get to grips with web 1.0 for more than a decade, along comes the sequel. I didn’t even get to properly enjoy the original, so how on earth am I going to even comprehend web 2.0?

What’s the point of this rant? Fair question. The point is that free domain name registration and free web hosting is not as “free” as I’d like it to be, and maybe also as free as many others would like it to be. Never mind that it is unreasonable to demand free domain name registration and free web hosting, we even subconsciously expect a free geeky techie person who knows how to do everything to do everything for us.

Some of the domain name registration and web hosting that is advertised as free may well be free, but the majority have strings attached, such as a set-up fee. Personally, having set up a domain name registration and web hosting company of my own (http://1and1webhosting.biz), I do not begrudge any of these guys for trying different marketing techniques, and it doesn’t strike me as unscrupulous to be asking for a set-up fee for doing something as complex as setting up a website for someone. After all, in the early days of web 1.0, set-up fees would have ranged in the tens of thousands of dollars – at a minimum.

Technology does indeed move fast. In fact, it’s surprising that we’re only at web 2.0. The number of changes the web has gone through has been astounding. It wasn’t too long ago that individual pages would take several minutes to fully appear on-screen. Now, BT, the UK telecoms provider is planning to upgrade customers to 20MBps internet, which would enable people to do many things – watch hi-def TV programmes via the internet, play ultra hi-res games on whatever console they own, do their shopping while lying in bed wearing virtual reality goggles to virtually roam around the high street – all at the same time, and still leave room for someone like me to stutter through wikipedia articles on how to get your website online.

So, back to free domain name registration and free web hosting. I entered both those terms separately and together in Google, as I’m sure many people have, to see what came up. However, for the purposes of keeping the article short, I’ll give you my general impressions rather than make an exhaustive list of everything.

We can deal with free domain name registration first, as there is less information readily available when you do a search. It seems that you can get a free domain name, as long as the domain name has a suffix that is unfamiliar, such as .cc or .nr or .tk – many of these letters representing tiny countries around the world that nobody’s heard of. For example, .cc refers to the Cocos Islands, which is almost invisible on the Google map, but it reportedly does exist somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

Often, companies will give you a free domain name if you buy hosting from them, but I think in this article, we are attempting to locate totally free domain name registration and totally free web hosting – no set-up fees or any strings attached. And we are not including subdomains.

To cut a long story short, like that phrase popularised in the “Greed is Good” 1980s, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”. The company that registers your domain name for you almost certainly has to pay for registration somewhere along the line, so it will, at some point, pass that cost on to you. I’m not saying don’t bother looking for a free domain name registration company, I’m saying they are almost impossible to find and they are likely to use the term free quite loosely.

Now, onto free web hosting. When I entered the term “free web hosting”, the first result after the adverts was http://www.free-webhosts.com, which is a directory of free web hosts. Convenient and helpful. Their home page is not the most flashy, scenic route to take to a free web host but it’s packed with information, and if you’ve got the patience to wade through that, you’re almost certainly the geeky techie type everyone needs and wants when they are looking to set up a website because you had the patience to learn all that HTML, Javascript, php and all sorts of other things that go into creating the web what it is today – web 2.0.

But many of us just want a website registered and online in double quick time and want it to be a simple process and do not have the patience to go through so much technical stuff. And, although online life is so much easier now that it was before, with things moving towards being WYSIWYG and open source, it still requires tremendous amounts of time and effort to get your website registered and online, especially if you go to a web host that offers free hosting and expects you to set up and run everything without any help – which is fair enough, they’re not making money out of you, and still they’re giving you some space. What more do you want?

What’s in it for them is that, they hope, in time, you will upgrade to a paid package, or that you will buy services from one of their partner companies, from whom they will receive commission. Some also place ads on your website in the hope that you will click on them and make them a few pence per click. There are a number of ways for them to try and recoup the investment they make in setting up their web hosting company, and mostly it’s legal. Mostly.

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