Using a free domain name has both its advantages and disadvantages. In order to determine if the use of a free domain name will benefit you, you may want to take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of using them.

Advantages
Free domains are a cheap way to generate sub domains, allow redirects to your site, and to grab available similar domains to yours. You can use the free page space to link to your sites. In a way it can be like free promotion for you to the world in some ways (within reason). Using free domains can really help you if you are creating a large directory of some sort, or you need extra database pages that you would want all unique names for. These free names can also help present you to your fellow Internet community.

The best free exposure that you would obtain on the Web is most likely forums and blogs. You also may want to consider joining different Internet groups. Always be safe when doing so, of course. You will want to beware of the disadvantages of free web hosting as well. You can take a look at the next section to understand what this means.

Disadvantages
You usually are only allowed a limited web space, and it is easier for someone to steal a free name. Likewise, free web host services do not usually have an extensive data base for checking the availability of a web domain. Usually you are not allowed to ad a large number of extra features such as free games, chat rooms, forums, blogs, and so forth. Additionally the people who visit your site may wonder if you are legitimate or not.

The biggest disadvantage of all that you may want to head is that free domains and/or sub domains often are overlooked by search engines-at least major ones. Therefore, the pages of free domains have the tendency to of a low rank. This means that you will not have as much traffic visiting your site as you would like. The web page address (URL) to your home page is hard to remember and very long. Along with that, your free domain may only be the last portion of that extremely long URL. Free domains may not offer very dependable service in most cases as well.

The other not-so-good thing about free web pages is the fact that you may have part of your space taken up by banner ads and so forth. You usually would have a hard time making any money from ad revenue on a free domain page. It is much better in some cases to register with a domain registrar that is listed in the ICANN agency directory.