Microsoft offers “free website registration and hosting”

Microsoft apparently offers free domain registration and website hosting at its Office Live Basics section.

I decided to register for a domain there, so I went to this URL and clicked on the green Get it for FREE button.

First turn off – it said, “In order to use Microsoft Office Live, you will need to have Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later running on Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Microsoft Windows Server 2003. You can download the latest version of Internet Explorer from the Internet Explorer downloads page.” Interesting.

Well, I decided to anyway check it out. So I revisited that URL using Internet Explorer 7.

I decided on a domain name and somewhere down the line, saw this – “Enter credit card information“. I clicked on the link that said “Why is this needed?” and read this:

When you sign up for a Microsoft Office Live account, Microsoft performs a $1 authorization check on your credit card to verify that the card information you are using is valid and up to date. A temporary $1 charge may appear on your online credit card statement for a short period, but will not appear on your final billing statement for that period.

Why should I pay for this when its supposedly free? And you can’t use any browser other than Internet Explorer? And it runs only ASP/ASP.NET apps anyway. Its probably better to just pay $6.95 and get the domain name registered with Godaddy or Namecheap. And spend a few more bucks when you want hosting space with a very reliable Linux webhosting company like Bluehost.

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