Can I Have A Website Without Buying A Domain Name?

Date First Published: 17th March 2023

Topic: Computer Networking

Topic: Network Identifiers

Article Type: Computer Questions & Answers

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn about whether you can have a website without buying a domain name in this article.

Some people wonder whether it is possible to create a website and make it live without having to buy a domain name. The answer to this question is that you can and it is possible, but in the long run, it is not recommended. The reasons why it is not recommended can be found below. This article will explore the methods that people use to make their website live without having to buy a domain name and the effect that they can have in the long run.

Methods Of Creating A Website Without Buying A Domain Name

Free subdomain name from a web host

Free web hosting providers often provide users with a free subdomain name, such as mysite.websitebuilder.com. The domain name is owned by the web host and they are allowing the user to create a subdomain of their domain name for free.

Whilst free subdomains are okay for a temporary website, they do come with some disadvantages, including:

• Long URLs. These do not look as professional as custom domains with shorter URLs and are less memorable.
• Limited DNS features.
• If the web host closes down, does not reregister their domain name, or decides to stop offering free subdomains, you will lose your free subdomain name, which basically means losing your web address. For more information, see the effects of losing your web address below.
• If you switched hosting providers and used a free subdomain, you would have to change the URL of your website to the subdomain provided by the other hosting provider, and people might not know the new URL. This would also basically mean losing your web address.

Free domain name

There is a provider that offers domain names for free without having to pay a yearly fee. You can get a domain name for free from Freenom. You can register one with the following TLDs: '.gq', '.ga', '.ml', '.cf', and '.tk'.

Whilst free domain names are good for testing purposes and temporary websites, keep in mind that Freenom is not trustworthy. This is because they will eventually take away your domain name when it gets good enough traffic and make you pay to get it back. There is evidence of people losing their domain names when their sites started getting hundreds of visitors a day. In addition, you don't own the rights to any of the domain names that you registered for free. Overall, using a free domain name is quite risky for anything serious.

Not using a domain name at all

It is possible to run a website with no domain name at all. All that is required to create a website and make it public is a web server. Without using a domain name at all, your website will be accessible by its IP address and visitors will have to enter an IP address to access your website. This method comes with some disadvantages, including:

• Much harder to access. The reason why domain names were created is to make websites easier to access and not require people to memorise the IP address. Very few websites do not have a domain name and require you to enter the IP address.
• Much less memorable. IP addresses tell you nothing about the website. They are just a string of numbers separated by full stops that identify a device on a network. Domain names are designed to tell you what a website is about.
• Decreased visitor trust. It is unlikely that you see an IP address come up very often in a Google search result. Websites without a domain name can look suspicious to visitors.

Effects Of Losing Your Web Address

If you lose your web address due to the free web host closing down or the free domain provider suspending the registration of your free domain name (which they can do at any time as you don't own the rights to the domain name), there are a number of negative effects.

If your web host closed down and you lost your free subdomain, you might think that it is easy to find another free web host, get a new web address, and upload your backup of files there, and to an extent, people are right. But, if you lost your web address and switched to another one, it would cause a permanent URL change without a redirect, causing all bookmarked links, external links, and indexed URLs to become broken.

This means that anyone that has bookmarked your website and regularly visits it will end up on a browser error page. They won't know that you have switched to a new web host or try to search for your new address. Websites get taken down from the internet on a daily basis and they will likely assume that your website has just disappeared. Overall, you will lose all your visitors for at least some time.

There are also major SEO problems when losing your free subdomain name. All links pointing from the search engines to your websites and from other websites to your websites will be broken. Search engines, such as Google use the number of external links pointing to a page as a major ranking factor when determining the order that the results are listed on the search results page, so if you relaunched a website with a new subdomain name, your new site will be considered less valuable than your old one to search engines as all the link equity has been broken. This will cause a great drop in organic traffic.

In addition, it can take a very long time to get your links back again. Even though you can tell other websites to update their links, not everyone will update their links straight away and this can be a time-consuming process as you might have hundreds of links built over a few years from hundreds of different websites.

Overall, if you lose your old web address without being able to redirect it to your new one, it is like starting a new website all over again. You will have to start the whole process of promoting your website, building links, and getting it indexed by search engines all over again. But, if you have your own domain name, you will take it with you when you change web hosts. All you have to do is point it to your new web host and you will keep the same web address. If you don't mention it on your website, it is unlikely that visitors will ever know that you changed web hosts. Domain names are very affordable, at about £10 a year, and will save you a lot of hassle in the long run.

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