Originally Posted by
Chrissy
There is if they charge you £11 to remap it to them. I started off by using Fasthosts, a Company I previously used in the UK. In order to get Wordpress, I had to buy cluster hosting and that includes a free domain. So I cancelled my domain.
I'm now completely free on Wordpress. My domain lasted less than 24 hours before I got my money back. My website is now :
inkyfountainpens.wordpress.com A bit of a long domain, but free so far. If I run out of space, I can pay for hosting and get a free domain later.
I just checked on their web site. REGISTERING something.co.uk for two years is £11 (I believe that this is what you're referring to). That would be just the registration, and then you would host the content wherever you want, for an additional monthly or yearly fee. That's the way it's supposed to be.
You can also follow Ivan's strategy and register chrissy.co.uk and have it forward visitors to chrissy.wordpress.com, which results in free HOSTING, but if you want to have your own domain name (whether you host like Ivan or how I described), so people can find you easily, you NEED to REGISTER the domain name somewhere (fasthosts, dotster, etc.).
Fasthosts' registration prices are a bit above industry averages, though. A cursory read on bluehost yields $12/yr for registration of the domain name, $4/mo for hosting for the first year and then $9/mo.
If you HOST the content at fasthosts, they give you the registration service for free. While £5/month for their Cluster plan isn't prohibitively expensive, you could probably do better.
Regardless of how you choose to host your content, I strongly recommend that you register whatever name you want as soon as you can, even if you can't put it to use immediately. Domain names have a tendency to be snatched up.
alex
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