Is there any way that I can own a domain name without paying for it ?

[Annoyingfeast057]

[Steve D]

Sure...for about a year. Many web hosts will offer you free domain names for a year in exchange for a hosting contract. Once the year is up, you will have to renew the domain name and it will cost you.

[Uncommon Sense]

Sure. Right next to the free apartments and cars.

[Jake]

No there's a hard administrative cost to any decent domain names. As mentioned they are commonly included in hosting package bundles costing around $8 a month ($96 a year) and cost the same in following years.

You can find .info names for $2 in the first year, some believe they end up taking a year longer to get decent search ranking.

There have been occasional free domain names, but they are trouble worse than a subdomain, Google actually banned 11 million free co.cc domains from their index because too high a percentage were used for devious purposes, too easy to use in risky schemes.

[Karen]

Securing a domain name is pretty inexpensive and as someone previously mentioned, some hosting packages wrap up the domain name registration in the initial cost.

If you're not looking to pay for hosting either, then you're going to have to go with something like wordpress.com to get hosting and the domain name, which would then be http://www.yoursitesname.wordpress.com.

If you're trying to create a brand or build a site for your business, you're always better off just coughing up the money for a real domain name and self-hosting. They're not as expensive as you might think.

[Shaista Jabeen]

sure.