If you are going to give a critique, be honest about the real value a user can get. If you want to stress to new WP users the best way to learn, then talk about InstantWP.

Oh, and thanks for writing about this subject on your blog. I didn’t have any Medium subscribers when I posted my story about this very same topic.

I wouldn’t consider it a long term solution in the same sense as wouldn’t consider free wordpress hosting a long term solution. I believe the main restrictions are that you have to re-register every 3 months or so, and that if you let your domain name fall into disuse and it has some traffic, they’ll turn it into a landing page. But if all you want is to test something for a month or two on your server, that’s irrelevant. And if you’re okay with reregistering every three months, then I guess its plausible for the long term. You can also point the DNS records to wherever you want without issues, and registration and propogation can be done in a few hours.

By the way, “.tk” doesn’t seem to fare too well SEO-wise (would make sense considering that there are probably a lot of junk sites). And the story behind why .tk domains are free is pretty interesting and worth a read.

Anyway, just wanted to point it out since for people with multi-domain hosting, sometimes getting a free temporary domain name can be the bigger issue. Good article, by the way.