Starting a competitive spelling bee competition? Need to prank a friend with a Tumblr collection of their embarrassing childhood photos? Want to start a poor facsimile of Google? Well, South African registrar Domains.co.za has you covered. Today and tomorrow you can register up to five .xyz domains for free. Of course, if you still need any of them in year’s time you’ll have to pay, but that’s future you’s problem.
From 3 June you’ll still be able to register a .xyz on the cheap (R10 for the year), but that’s not quite as compelling as “free”, now is it?
“With increasing competition making it nearly impossible for brands to register the .com or .net domains they need, the .xyz domain is now another leading choice for anyone interested in a three-letter, top level domain,” says Wayne Diamond, MD of Domains.co.za.
Heck, the .xyz is good enough for Google, which uses abc.xyz as the new online home of its parent company Alphabet. But then, it’s a clever play on Google’s ubiquity and reach, plus it sounds better in an American accent where the C rhymes with the Z. Also, in a time where Google is so omnipresent and omniscient, who pays attention to URLs anymore anyway? If you can remember a pertinent detail or two you can look it up.
Still, we’re excited about the prank possibilities provided by free domains. We’re less excited at the prospects of creating an Alphabet parody account as all of the variations on ABC — like ayebeesee, abebeesea and aybesi — are already taken… quite possibly by Google, which we can believe would be smart enough to preempt our tomfoolery.
“Possibly the biggest benefit of .xyz to the worldwide Internet community is that it enables the kind of fresh creativity in domain name registration that has become increasingly difficult in a cluttered web,” Diamond adds. In other words, pranksters and pun-masters, start your engines.
So, have we tempted you? Do you want a free domain you probably won’t use for a year and will then let lapse? Excellent! Head over here.