In the price wars among the hundreds of domain registrars and Web hosting companies, there is no weapon quite as popular as the word free. Companies use the word almost as much as politicians in wartime and hope that it carries equal force and conviction. But it has become so watered-down that even the most bright-eyed optimist puts on an Andy Rooney scowl when marketers chirp, "Free!" Who in the marketplace is going to offer anything of real value for less than market value? Certainly, some Web hosting companies will register your domain free of charge, but only if you've signed up for an annual contract that usually tops a hundred bucks per year. Domain registrars may offer free Web and e-mail hosting, but only if you pay a premium over the standard bargain-basement registration fees, which are hovering around the $10-per-year mark on the open market.

Chanting the consumer-advocacy mantra, "Where's the catch?" as I went, I scoped out Onesite, looking for loopholes.

It's that slippery use of the word free that made me suspicious when one of the big-name domain registrars, Catalog.com, announced a soi-disant free service called Onesite recently. The domain registration and Web hosting service quietly launched in a prerelease form a few weeks ago. Chanting the consumer advocacy mantra, "Where's the catch?" as I went, I scoped out the offering, looking for loopholes. I looked pretty hard. And I'm still looking. It's not for everyone, of course, but it's a sound match for anyone who likes what Hotmail (free e-mail) and Geocities (free hosting) offer but who craves those services at a domain name of their own.

The offer
Here's the deal: for noncommercial use, anyone (those under 18 need to show parental approval) can register .com, .net, .org, .info, .us, .biz, and .ws. domains free of charge at Onesite. The free domain comes with free Web site hosting, free Web mail, and a rudimentary blog builder, also free. You can slap a site together using a Web-based file manager to upload sites you've already developed, or you can go step by step through a template-driven site builder. The sum total retail cost for these services is nothing at all.

Oh, and the site owner can log on to get a different view of the site: The area above your home page expands to include news feeds, a calendar and a scheduler, a weather forecast, and a list of your favorite links, all à la My Yahoo. True, the list of news sources is somewhat limited (to MSN, Yahoo, and the Washington Post at press time), but the feeds are customizable.

The competition
Several companies offer bits of what Onesite has to offer, but as far as I can see, nobody else has it all. Angelfire and Geocities provide breezy, build-it-yourself, free Web site hosting like Onesite's SiteBuilder. But they don't provide corresponding e-mail, and even if they did, it wouldn't have a domain name of your choosing in it. Hotmail and Yahoo Mail provide the free Web-mail address, but again, without your domain name. And Blogger and Blog Drive provide free spots for posting blogs. (No prizes for guessing what they don't provide, either.)

The free domain comes with free Web site hosting, free Web mail, and a rudimentary blog builder, also free.

Onesite's offerings are pretty decent all around. Some, such as the portal, run in the middle of the pack; others, such as the Web mail and SiteBuilder, are at the top end of the scale. The only thing that's really unique in the current market is the free domain--and that's the real clincher, isn't it?

The catch?
Sounds good so far, but there has to be a catch somewhere. A couple of weeks into the service, Onesite added a clause in its user agreement guaranteeing only one year free, with a charge for subsequent years. I spoke with Catalog.com's management and was told that the company is "working on building a usage meter that, if you get so much traffic, search, and general usage, you continue to keep the domain and the Web site for free. Until this is defined... the second year could cost them."

And like most free hosting, Onesite reserves the right to slap identifiers and advertising on your pages, which may encroach on your page design somewhere down the line. The good news is that at press time, while the service is still officially in a beta release, the Onesite identifier is very modest, amounting to an extremely modest search and login bar at the top of the page, not quite as thick as a button bar. The search bar is designed to search for keywords on your site and on the Web, and naturally, the Web results are on a pay-to-play basis and, therefore, are of limited use for any serious kind of research. But the bar is extremely subtle; it's unlikely to encroach on most page designs.

You need a credit card to verify your identity (and to protect Onesite's parent company from abusive users), but it will not be charged. A day or so after you register, your domain will be live and you can log in to build your site.

On the off chance that good service may someday turn bad, I always look for an exit strategy. This is the only red flag I could find at Onesite: To protect itself from being a victim of its own generosity (and from the tendency of people to gorge themselves on free stuff), Catalog.com protects Onesite domains against transfers--you can't transfer the domain to a new host without paying 50 bucks first. So this isn't a service you'd want to consider for warehousing a domain that you want to use to develop into a quasicorporate, all-singing-all-video-streaming site later. It would be cheaper to warehouse a site at a discount domain for five years than to transfer it out of Onesite. In the end, Onesite is a service you buy into--lock, stock, and blog generator--for the medium to long haul. Except that instead of buying into it, you just ask and receive.

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