Doteasy Domain Name Registration & Hosting Service

Domain registration through Doteasy is a few bucks more expensive than some other registration services, but the free hosting they provide compensates for this increased fee. One year domain registration costs $25, while two year and five year registration terms will run $45 ($22.50/yr) and $90 ($18/yr) respectively.

Doteasy provides free web hosting that will fit the needs of a basic startup website. Free hosting provides 100MB of space for storing your website's content and 1GB of bandwidth per month. Free hosting, however, lacks support for scripting languages such as PHP, MySQL, Perl, and ASP. In addition, if you wish to develop a secure website for e-commerce, you will need to upgrade hosting as free hosting lacks support for secure web pages using SSL. 10 email accounts with 5MB of storage are provided with your freely hosted website. Your personal email "whateveryouwant@yourwebsite.com" can be accessed via POP3 using a program such as Outlook Express or Mozilla's Thunderbird, or online using Doteasy Webmail. Each time a user logs into either Webmail or the "member zone" - where the account's website features are accessed - he is prompted with a mildly annoying ad to upgrade hosting - however, the free hosting is well worth this inconvenience in my opinion. The member zone provides access to a variety of features including your disk storage as well as a bandwidth monitor so you can ensure you don't exceed your monthly bandwidth limit.

Despite the scripting restrictions of the free hosting service, Doteasy provides free Javascript-based web plug-ins to help build your website. The eight plug-ins include web directory, web polls, tell-a-friend, guestbook, FAQ, mailing list, hit counter, and email form. These tools are fairly well designed, however, you will have to settle with a small "doteasy.com" graphic displayed at the bottom of each tool displayed on your site.