Freebies You Can Snag by Owning a Domain

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Generally, a domain costs at least $12, and some people want to get their own domain but hesitate about whether it’s necessary.

I highly recommend that developers prepare their own domain because owning a domain can get you a lot of freebies.

Here I mainly introduce two service providers I’m familiar with: one is the so-called “Cyber Buddha” Cloudflare, and the other is the developing Alibaba ESA.

Here I first emphasize that the Alibaba ESA that can get freebies specifically refers to the international version. Alibaba has almost no freebies for mainland China, and those time-limited trials have been kicked out of my freebie category. Only permanent freebies are real freebies.

In addition, freebies usually have usage limits. If the domain goes viral and the traffic gets big, you can earn money with this domain yourself. Still purely getting freebies doesn’t make much sense.

A brief introduction to the categories that can be gotten for free:

  1. Computing resources: CPU, memory
  2. Persistent storage: file storage, database
  3. Traffic: CDN, DDoS protection, WAF protection, zero-trust networking

Computing Resources

Cloudflare’s computing resource freebies are mainly achieved through Cloudflare Workers, which are sufficient for start-ups. You can understand that Cloudflare allows you to run a simple business process on its servers. The CPU time is limited to 10ms, and complex services require paid workers. Proxying DoH and hosting static websites are typical use cases.

Alibaba’s is Edge Functions, whose product maturity is far behind Cloudflare. I’ve tried developing something simple, and it’s very inconvenient to use.

Persistent Storage

Cloudflare:

  • Provides 10 GB of R2 object storage, which can be understood as a file system, but is not suitable for processing 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 an sqlite database. When I was developing, I found that the local database file could indeed be opened directly with sqlite. I’m not sure how the server-side is specifically implemented.

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 communicate with each other, and you can directly expose a public service from the intranet without having to buy a VPS.

Conclusion

When writing this share, I looked at Cloudflare again and felt it was really a treasure trove with many practical free services. This sharing only touches on the tip of the iceberg. In comparison, Alibaba ESA has little to offer. In my limited experience, it only has the advantage of allowing registered domains to provide CDN on the mainland, which might be worth considering in a couple of years.