I have never heard of anybody giving out free top-level domain ( meaning .com’s, .net’s, and .org’s) registration for free, but HelioHost claims to be doing just that, ofcourse there are requirements and a lot of vague terms used to probably insure you never get to the point where you can actually get the free domain - free ipods anyone?

You must accumulate 5000 Helions at our partner HelioNet’s website and be an active member of it for at least four months to qualify.

Active member, in these terms usually means anything you are doing an active member can do more and better, so sorry but you don’t qualify thanks for your effort though. Also there is probably about a million things to do on the web that in four months will earn you the $1.99 needed to get a domain from Yahoo, anyhow lets check out the hosting plans maybe the deal gets better…

So they basically have two plans one with 150 MB space and 1.5 GB bandwidth and another with 250MB and 2.5GB bandwidth and two ways two earn the plans, posting or placing ads. The plans are stacked with all the features you get with a paid host, although their posting requirements are ridiculous, for the smaller plan you would have to do around 9 posts/day on their forum and for the slightly larger plan you would have to do 33 posts/day (full time job), that’s without skipping any days!

This posting for hosting model clearly doesn’t work and is evident by HelioHost’s own forum which features exciting threads such as Say some random Words!, Its fun saying random words! where members clearly are just trying to meet the crazy posting requirements.

So I would say HelioHost is worth trying out only if you want to opt for the plan with the ads and absolutely can’t live with out all the extra features, otherwise the space and bandwidth really are not enough to request such effort.

UPDATE:

Owner of HelioHost contacted me and it seems that I misunderstood the worth of a Helion, which is 10 posts, so actually it would be .9 posts/day and 3.3 posts/day for the bigger plan, not as bad if post-for-host is what you are after.