Free domains for developers

For IT enthusiasts who need a temporary domain name or those who can't or don't want to pay for a top level domain 🌍

Available extensions:

• your-name.cluster.ws
• your-name.wip.la

Note that .la and .ws are both considered global by Google just like .com

How does it work?

1. Verify your domain availability
2. Add your domain to a DNS provider
3. Register your domain with the DNS records given by your provider
4. After 1 year, it expires, unless you renew it

Verify your domain availability

Let's say you want the domain example.cluster.ws

Option 1

Run the following command:

nslookup -type=ns example.cluster.ws

If you see something like server can't find example.cluster.ws: NXDOMAIN, your domain is available.

Option 2

Search in the file zones/cluster.ws.yaml for the term "example" to see if it's already registered

Add your domain to a DNS provider

Once you settled on available domain, you need to know which DNS servers to use before you can register it. This is why you need to add it to your DNS provider first.

Here are some DNS providers you can use:

Provider	DNS price	Sign-up bonus	Where to go (after sign-up)
Digital Ocean	Free	$100	Networking > Domains
Linode	Free	$100	Domains > Create
Vultr	Free	$100	DNS > Add domain
ClouDNS	Free	No	DNS Hosting > Create Zone > Master zone
FreeDNS	Free	No	Domains > Add A Domain into FreeDNS
Hetzner	Free	No	DNS > Add zone
AWS	Paid	No	Route 53 > Hosted zones > Create hosted zone
Google Cloud	Paid	$300	Cloud DNS > Create a DNS zone

Some of the links above are referral links to support this repo

Unfortunately, you cannot use Cloudflare with these domains because they are in fact subdomains and Cloudflare does not support adding a subdomain as a domain.

Register a domain

Now go to the corresponding zone file for your chosen domain.

For example.cluster.ws, edit the zone file zones/cluster.ws.yaml, and follow the format used by the other domains to set the nameservers given by your DNS provider.

Renew your domain

All domains expire automatically one year after the last modification. So, if you want to "renew" your domain, just make a modification to your domain in the zone file. For example, you can add # renew at the end of the line, and the year after, modify it to # renew 2, and so on.

Only the original committer can renew their domain.

This repo will send 3 reminders (1 month, 1 week and 1 day before expiration) to your commit email address. If you use a no-reply address and plan to renew your domain, don't forget to add it in your calendar!

Supporting this repo

Due diligence

All the code for managing these domains (permissions, validation, etc.) is located in this repo.

We try to keep at least 2 years before the expiration of these domains.

You can check their expiration date from a whois website or from your command line:

whois cluster.ws | grep -i expir
whois wip.la | grep -i expir

Abuse

We're trying to make the world a better place, please don't abuse this system 🙏

We reserve the right to cancel any domain and ban any user from using this free service if we think the system is being abused for spam, child pornography, illegal activities, racism, bullying, etc.

If you think a domain is abusing our system, please open an issue