[awan]

So guys, maybe some of you have already known this but just in case you didn't know yet, i'm gonna tell you that it's true, namecheap provide you a free .me domain for a year (and some heavily discounted domain for .io, .tech, .com, .website) as long as you have .edu email address. How to obtain one? You can get it from a university if you're a college student (or an ex-college student, like me  )

Currently, i have two free domain which i'm already using it by now (one of them just hosted here , https://itsliterally.me)
All you gotta do is visit this site https://nc.me and do the process there. You gotta check the domain availability and register an account using .edu email. Don't get me wrong, i purchased some premium domains too so i'm not always a free user

Wait, did i say more on the title? Yes!

Now as long as you have .edu email address, you can get something more. Go grab a Github Student Developer Pack here : https://education.github.com/pack/offers . Register using your .edu email and some of my favorite feature that you can get from there are free ssl from namecheap for a year (which you can use to your previous free domain as well) , and also a " Sendgrid Student plan 15K free emails/month (normally limited to 200 free emails/day) while you're a student " . You can also get bunch of other stuffs there, just go check 'em out.

Please use these carefully for educational purposes , or personal purposes. Don't misused this opportunity. 

P.S. 
Hey admin! Can i use gigarocket to create a shortening url site? i have one domain (which is qaz.me) and i would love to use it for a short url shortener for several of my website, if i could ( i currently hosted it on a url shortener service as a custom domain) . If it's not allowed, then i'm just gonna stick to other service 

[Kiriot22]

That's cool, but  live in another coutry where our school doesn't have an ".edu" email, nor do they give us ones. Guess I'll just stick to free .tk domains then.

[Genesis]

That's cool, but  live in another coutry where our school doesn't have an ".edu" email, nor do they give us ones. Guess I'll just stick to free .tk domains then.

True. I stand under correction, but I think the US has exclusivity with the .edu e-mail address so students enrolled in US dot.edu secondary educational institutions are the beneficiaries of the namecheap free domain.
https://net.educause.edu/eligibility.htm

[awan]

Hmm, interesting. Well, there are some 'illegal' way to get .edu email out there (my friend created about 10 of them , which is crazy) but i didn't even get any closer to get one email haha. Considering the circumtances, i really suggest to get a cheap domain instead. Surely this isn't a solution for free user but hey, you do know that you can a domain for 1 usd right? 

GoDaddy and Ionos (formerli 1&1) have that offer (and still do). The only requirement is that you have to use debit / credit card wich support international payment system. Luckily, i have them already (a debit card with visa) and i was able to claim the offer.

I know that it's sucks for students who have to struggle with getting free / cheap domain names. Believe me, i've been on that road. I'm creating a social network using a cms based back on 2010 (when i was on junior high school, second grade) and i was using free domains too! (And also free hosting haha ). But when the times come when you finally able to buy your own things on the internet legally with a cheap price, it'll be worth it. 

Or maybe you can ask your parents to help you with these education things on learning how to be a website developer by asking them to lend them or do the payment for several cheap domain that you can have

P.S.
I maybe add some little free giveaway domain in the future. Is a giveaway .com / cheapest domain for a year good enough for the community? I'm not promising okay, but if i have the chance, i would love to do that.

[Genesis]

That would be awesome, many thanks @awan. Maybe you could run a competition with it?

For me freenom.com is great for free domains. I've been using free domains from them for many years. The freenom Website works very well. There is a down side however in that the basis of its business is to get people to develop free domains and to build traffic. Once a domain has X traffic then Freenom takes it back (without a warning) and one can either get it as a paid domain, or sometimes lose it when someone else has grabbed it. One also has to make sure one has a Website on it. I used to have a great number of freenom free domains at the time when domains weren't that cheap and it was known as dot.tk. I can still recommend freenom though. Like if the domain is taken back, one can easily get a new free domain. There are several free extensions available. I use Freenom free domains a lot for testing new projects, and when the project takes off I then get a TLD domain from NameCheap or NameSilo.

[SonLight]

I don't know  about Namecheap's policy, but I do know that .edu addresses have been limited to the US -- but have equivalents in most countries. Most country tld's have second level domains that act like top levels for most purposes. For examplle, .co.uk is considered the equivalent of .com within Great Britain. Many countries assign .edu.<country code> for universities.

I would suggest anyone who has a .edu.<country code> domain to check and see if namecheap will accept it. My guess is they will if it's a major country that they consider reliable in only handing out the .edu's to legitimate universities. Or they could accept it if the university itself is considered reputable. Or maybe they haven't realized yet that there is a whole world of 'hidden' .edu addresses for non-US students, in which case it will be interesting to see how -- and how quickly -- they react to the news.

Also if you're a student with a university email that does not have a .edu in the domain name, you might be interested in seeing how your university  and/or your country will react when informed that such an Internet standard exists.

[awan]

@SonLight actually, if somehow you can register GitHub Student Developer, you can also get that domain name (.me) for free for a year. It's not a big deal, you can look it up how (that's how i got my first free domain instead of directly using my .edu email account) .

@Genesis i have the same experience with Freenom except with the part where freenom take our domain name. For me, somehow it never happened . It's just expired (tons of them) and i don't even noticed the traffic restriction whatsoever. Free ccTld like freenom offered is only good for testing / development purpose only in my opinion. Even if you bought it as a premium domain, some mainstream media will still somehow blocked it because the tld considered as a spam. 

Well, as for the competition, maybe i'll do it later after i finish some work. Have a good idea of what kind of competition that we should held? It would be great :) . (I sent you a PM, not sure if i have to post it on the forum or send you directly instead)

[SoundsGood]

I am from Australia and I have a .edu.au email and they accepted it fine. Github package also accepted it. Thanks for that!