Freebies You Can Snag by Owning a Domain

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Generally, a domain name costs starting from $12, and some people want to get their own domain but hesitate whether it’s necessary.

I highly recommend that all developers prepare their own domain name, because owning a domain allows you to snag quite a few freebies.

Here, I’ll mainly introduce two service providers I’m familiar with: one is Cloudflare, known in the community as the “Cyber Patriarch,” and the other is the developing Alibaba ESA.

First, emphasize that the freebie-snagging Alibaba ESA specifically refers to the international version. Alibaba offers almost no freebies in mainland China; those limited-time trials are excluded from freebies—only permanently free counts as real freebies.

Additionally, freebies usually have usage limits. If your domain goes viral and traffic spikes, you could even make money from this domain, so purely snagging freebies indefinitely wouldn’t make sense.

Simple categories of freebies you can snag:

  1. Compute resources: CPU, memory
  2. Persistent storage: File storage, databases
  3. Traffic: CDN, DDoS protection, WAF protection, zero-trust networking

Compute Resources

Cloudflare’s compute freebies are mainly through Cloudflare Workers, sufficient for startups. You can think of it as Cloudflare allowing you to run a simple business process on their servers. CPU time is limited to 10ms; complex businesses require paid Workers. Typical use cases include proxying DoH or hosting static websites.

Alibaba’s is Edge Functions, with product maturity far behind Cloudflare. I’ve tried developing a bit with it, and it’s inconvenient to use.

Persistent Storage

Cloudflare:

  • Provides 10 GB of R2 object storage, which can be understood as a file system, but not suitable for streaming data.
  • Provides KV key-value storage, which can be understood as an in-memory database, similar to Redis.
  • D1 provides 5GB of free storage space, similar to a SQLite database. During development, I found that the local database file can indeed be opened directly with SQLite, unsure about the exact server-side implementation.

Alibaba:

  • Free 5GB object storage

Traffic

Cloudflare traffic is completely free Alibaba free 100GB traffic

Cloudflare also provides networking capabilities, allowing devices in multiple locations to interconnect, and you can expose a public service directly from your intranet without buying a VPS.

Conclusion

While writing this post, I checked Cloudflare again and feel it’s truly a treasure trove with many practical free services—this post only scratches the surface. In comparison, Alibaba ESA is lackluster. In my limited experience, its only advantage is that filing a domain allows CDN in mainland China; you can consider it in a couple of years.