Free domain & Hosting for a year - should I go for it?

[bsabev]

Hey,

I am always in need of webhosting for my clients, php & mysql webhosting specifically.

Normally I rent a vserver for my clients.

Recently I stumbled upon this vendor from Austria, who is offering free domains + free webhosting for 12 months. The cost for the second year seems to be decent and it seems there are no mandatory minimum contracts.

Would this type of (probably shared) webhosting deal be suitable for webshops with 100s of visits dayly or should I stick to vservers?

The offer I am referring to: http://www.easyname.com/en/com-domain

Is this for real?

[pixelsoul]

The old saying "You get what you pay for" comes to mind.
I get my domains from a trusted registrar, and I get my hosting based on quality+reputation+price.

A site with a couple hundred visitors a day should be fine on a shared hosting plan, as long as the site content is well optimized, so it isn't utilizing tons of bandwidth to download something on page loads. I would also leverage some caching system and something like Amazon S3 for images, and download files.

[stultuske]

Sure, why not? But, "try before you buy".
Since it's 12 months free, first try it out for a personal website (not linked to your client) for a period of (at least) a month.
See if it's stable, see if you can get lots of people to visit your page without it going down, check whether or not it is indeed as easy to configure as they claim, check their reliability and efficiëncy against your requirements (data that must be able to be transferred, number of mailboxes, number of simultaneous users, ... ) and, most of all, check for hidden nuisances.

They say you don't have to pay, they don't say they don't want an income of it. Check that they don't add banners on it for that time.
Something tells me that your client wouldn't really appreciate it if they have a "professional site" with adds for "Big Bob's penis enlargers" or any of that crap.