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Our Free Plan

DOM Cloud has a generous free plan as long as you have an invitation code. This article explains it with more details.

About​

The Free Plan offered by our cloud platform provides you with a great starting point to host your website without any cost. You don't need to provide any payment information to sign up for the Free Plan. You can use it for as long as you want, and you can upgrade to a paid plan at any time.

Our free plan is great for:

  • Those who are starting out learning web hosting.
  • Those who want to host a small website or a blog.
  • Students and teachers who want to host their projects.
  • Sharing your web projects with your friends and family.

Invitation Code​

An invitation code is required to enjoy our free plan. This is our way to prevent spam bots harming our kindly shared cloud service and maintain good performance for customers.

An Invitation Code can be asked from a friend who recommends you this cloud service. The invitation code format is IVME followed by 10 letters code.

Without an Invitation Code, your options are:

  1. Link your GitHub Account. Your GitHub account must be older than 6 months and has atleast one follower.
  2. Upgrade your plan. This is the simplest way we can trust you. You can Upgrade for 4.5$ once and stop subscribing. When you downgrade to free plan, you can still create new websites without invite code.
  3. Set up a self-hosted server. This is an option if you have a spare computer and want to put your data there. It will work even without public IP address with help of cloud tunnels.

Features​

Our free plan comes with the following features:

  • 1.5GB Free Storage: With the Free Plan, you get 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of storage space for your website files, databases, and other related content. This storage capacity allows you to host a small to medium-sized website with ease.
  • 2.0GB Network Data: The Free Plan includes 2 gigabytes (GB) of monthly network outbound data transfer. This means that your website can send up to 2GB of data to visitors' browsers or other servers. The count reset at the first day of the month.
  • Unrestricted Features: The Free Plan comes with all the features of our paid plans. This includes SSH access, Git integration, and more. The CPU and RAM resources will not be limited, although you cannot use x64 server due to cost.
  • Custom domain: All websites can use custom domain if you already buy one (either buying from ours or somewhere else). Read more about set up a DNS setup here.

Default Domain Availability​

A free domain is available with *.dom.my.id suffix. This domain should not be used for anything but testing or demo as they have a banner page that you can see below.

A subscription (as low as a Lite plan) is needed to use *.domcloud.dev domain. This domain is preferred over the former for personal sites and it will remain the same even if your account goes back to free plan.

Purchasing your own domain (like *.com) is recommended if you need branding and SEO for your website. You can purchase a domain either from us or any other registrar. To use a custom domain for websites hosted in DOM Cloud see the DNS setup page.

You can also share a domain securely for institutional or learning purposes.

tip

We recommend you to buy domain even with free plan, it will get rid the annoying side of using our free domain and good for your SEO.

If you don't care about SEO and don't have any domain, please spend at least 4.5$ to purchase Lite Plan for 3 months once so you can use our better free domain *.domcloud.dev. You can even stop subscribing after that and keeping the *.domcloud.dev domain name with free plan forever.

Third-Party API Access​

All websites created with free plan has firewall enabled. This blocks outgoing HTTP connection from server except to the list of whitelisted sites. This is implemented so that our generous free plan will not be abused for malicious bot, proxy and phising sites. To enable any third-party access, you need to upgrade your plan then disable firewall at individual websites.

When using free domains, anyone visiting your website will be prompted with this banner:

Free domain banner

It works by detecting whether the referer header is matching with the domain. Clicking the "trust" button will simply reloads the webpage with correct referer (automatically done by browser).

To get rid of it, upgrade and switch to *.domcloud.dev domain — or use any custom domain.

Free domains are susceptible to phising contents so this is why we are dong this. This banner should not appear if your site is intended as REST API — with the exception to PHP sites such as Laravel due to NGINX limitation.

Expiration Date​

All plans has expiration date and this includes all users with free plans. However, the expiration date of the free plan will extend automatically each time you logged in into your account. This means that as long as you logged in at least once every 60 days, your free plan will never expire.

Alternatively, if at the end of the month your total network data usage is more than 50 MB, your free plan will also be extended automatically for another 60 days.

The whole point of having this expiration date system for all users with free plan is to prevent abuse of it, and make sure that the resources are used by those who really need it.

Upgrading to Paid Plan​

Upgrading to a paid plan is easy, you can do it at any time from your account dashboard. Once you upgrade, you will get the benefits of extra storage and more network data transfer. Our billing system doesn't charge you automatically, so if you don't want to continue using the paid plan when it due, your account will be downgraded to the free plan automatically with another extra 60 days.

It's perfectly fine if you only upgrade once to get *.domcloud.dev or disabling firewall. We won't revert the config even if you go back to free plan. Just keep note that going back to free plan still reduces storage / network limit on your account.

What Happens When It Expires?​

If your free plan expires, you will have 14 days to log in to your account and extend it. If you don't log in within 14 days, all your website data will be removed from our servers permanently.

To make sure you're not forgetting it, we will send 3 email notifications to your registered email address before your account is deleted. This doesn't apply if you don't have any website in your account.