Freenom still offers free domains on five suffixes: .tk, .ml, .ga, .cf, and .gq. The service has a reputation for being closed, but registration remains possible—it just comes with a set of quirks that can waste a lot of time if you don't know them.
Freenom: possible, but fussy
Start with a VPN or proxy set to a U.S. location. Freenom has blocked mainland Chinese IPs after abuse, and it checks whether the country in your account matches your IP. Use global mode rather than a split tunnel, then open the Freenom site in your browser.
Search for the domain you want and use the availability checker. Include the suffix in the search—yourname.tk, not just yourname. If you leave the suffix off, the site may let you proceed and then tell you the domain is unavailable. The prefix also needs to be at least four characters; shorter names are treated as paid registrations. The default registration term is three months, so change it to 12 months. You can renew for free before it expires.
Create the account with Gmail or another foreign email provider. Outlook does not work. Open the verification link Freenom sends you. When filling in personal details, use U.S. information; if you don't have a real U.S. address, people commonly use a U.S. address generator. If you get a 'technical problem' message, edit your personal details and try again. Once registration goes through, the domain appears under My Domains. It is worth pointing the DNS to DNSPod or Cloudflare.
One warning matters more than all the setup steps: don't abuse the service. Freenom will ban accounts, and losing the domain is the usual result.
JS.ORG: shorter, permanent, stricter
JS.ORG offers free subdomains to developers and their projects, including blogs. Compared with the .github.io subdomain you get from GitHub Pages, a .js.org name is shorter and easier to remember. It also avoids the renewal cycle: unlike Freenom domains, a JS.ORG subdomain does not need to be renewed and can be kept permanently.
The catch is eligibility. Your blog needs to be hosted on GitHub Pages, and a site with too few posts will not be approved. In practice, you need a real GitHub Pages blog with enough published material before applying. Once those conditions are met, the subdomain is a clean option for a project or personal blog.
Freenom gives you a free top-level domain, but you pay for it with setup friction and renewal. JS.ORG gives you a shorter subdomain with no renewal, but it is limited to GitHub Pages and comes with an approval bar. Pick based on which set of constraints you can live with.