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CloudFlare Registrar? Worth Giving up Choice of DNS?
I LOOVE my DNS provider, got it all setup with every feature I need and it's flawless. I don't want to change them.. But I also like money and CloudFlare's Registrar is hands down the cheapest real option available. But to use it I gotta give up my sweet rights to using whatever NameServers I want.
Might just switch to PorkBun instead as their pricing is pretty darn close to cost but not sure how stable of a company they are vs NameSilo for example.
Cloudflare really knows how to entice a fellow though!
Comments
Don't sell your soul for the price of a cup of coffee, please.
It's a surprise to me that they require you to host the domain on CF just to use the registrar. Explains then, why it is provided by them supposedly with no markup. Stay away.
I do not know how many thousands of domains you have that you are thinking about this.
Be happy with PorkBun or NameSilo - and better cancel an idling VPS if money counts.
Oh and btw, Porkbun is both cheap and great.
Cheap pricewise, and open to suggestions of technical improvement (unlike some of their competitors cough namesilo cough).
No .win & .men support, no money from me.
CloudFlare has one strange limitation - there is no way for you to turn off their so-called WHOIS redaction service.
No, not worth it.
Still waiting, for the second big cloudflare outage.
Try on a domain or 2 to see if CF Registrar is for you. I've been slowly moving my domains over to Cloudflare Registrar in smaller bulk sets using CF API and loosing registrar's API and so far so good. Saving >37% in domain renewal costs
My write up at https://community.centminmod.com/threads/16038/ 
Sure you might save money, not sure if you can really call Cloudflare a serious registrar since you can't change nameservers.
It's ok if you don't mind using Cloudflare dns.
They seem like a solid winner, but that name all over my WhoIS as the registrar is just so off pudding. Realistically speaking probably not a big deal (GoDaddy isn't that professional of a name either). But idk it's the only thing holding me back from moving everything to them.
Pork buns are off pudding indeed.
Porkbun is a shitty name but it works well and their support is good.
Cloudflare has a somewhat better name but it's a big corporation and you are stuck using their DNS (which work well and are among the fatest).
I'd stick with porkbun. There is zero reason to use Cloudflare as a domain registrar. You're taking away basic functionality (changing NS) for what? a few cents?
Huge centralized services like Cloudflare scare me. A failure/outage is inevitable, and the effects of that centralization can paralyze the internet.
I didn't know Porkbun had free DDNS like Cloudflare.
And I would NOT call Cloudflare a centralized service.
Why not? Single company controlling (by now) a double-digit percentage of the web, sounds pretty damn centralized to me.
Stay away. I moved some domains there and DNSSEC could not be activated. Month later I moved away again, hosting.de with own Knot-DNS gives me more options.
There was a discussion about this on the Discord server when Warp came out. It seems like Cloudflare's goal is to centralise the consumer facing internet to only be served from their endpoints. Which from a business point of view makes sense but it's still worrying as they're well on their way to achieving it.
It seems like Cloudflare's goal is internet domination
The only reason I run my own DNS servers now is because of that time CloudFlare went offline for 6+ hours a year or two ago and the majority of websites I visit were unreachable. DNS caching FTW!
It's a reeally bad name. If someone didn't know who they were their name on a WhoIS looks like a joke/satire site. Doesn't help either that they have stuff like this:
https://porkbun.com/about/kesha
But LITERALLY THE ONLY REASON they don't have all of my business is their name. Their name could be Oola, or any other non discript name and I would be all for it. But PorkBun just sounds too much like a joke to be slapped onto all my WHOIS vs something like NameSilo or CloudFlare.
Apparently PorkBun's parent company is: Top Level Design - Lets go with that instead on the WHOIS huh? That's be great.
I like Cloudflare so far. I only have 1 .info domain with them, and I am happy with their service so far. The only reason I did not move other domains too is that lack of flexibility with changing nameservers.
I recommend them because of price. I do not recommend them because you can't change nameservers.
Conspiracy wise, they will never rule the internet because DNS is actually ruled by ICANN.
We use them for some domains at work. Stupid company names like that go down really well in Australia.
You shouldn't make false assumptions.
I have a few domains on CF Register and the DNS is hosted elsewhere.
It's very easy to make a support ticket and ask for the name servers to be changed.
Registars are required by ICANN to allow you to control your name servers.
Personally I wouldn't move my personal domains to Cloudflare as I'd prefer to support the smaller companies.
Really?!
I like this name, and I doubt 0.01% of visitors will run (not to mention "know how to run") a whois on a domain name whenever they use some of the services hosted there.
Of course, if you're jewish you may not like that your registrar is termed Porkthing. But on the other hand if you're pakistani or english you may not like the Gandi registrar. And if I were to buy a domain from someone, I'd run away upon realizing how some sick person registered it at 1&1, or NameCheapo, or even GoDaddy (is it a teen pr0n registrar, btw???)
"De gustibus non est disputandum"...
Yep, even if it involves sending 3 letters on a 1-week interval, with consonants painted in red and vowels in blue, written in finnish, they are required to allow it.
If Cloudflare allows defining the nameservers by opening a ticket, then it's just a big joke. Or a joke of a registrar. In addition to being another Don't-Be-Evil Megacorp SPOF NSALodge Inc.
What's the next step? Sending paperwork and a court order to rotate the DNSSEC stuff on their end?
Well, they intention is clear, to lock you to Cloudflare.
Otherwise, it would be possible to change them.
Besides, sure, if you tell them ICANN demands that its changeable, they change it for you.
They do not want to get sued or lose their status ICANN accredited status.
Still, I would not move my money into Cloudflare, just because the domain is a few cents cheaper then Namesilo or Porkbun.
Yep, that sounds exactly right to me. It's not just Warp, either; consider things like Argo and now their registrar service, and it's pretty clear that they want to control all of the internet's infrastructure. While pretending to 'save the internet'.
It's quite telling, for example, how in Cloudflare's marketing campaign around their registrar service, they're focusing entirely on how they beat out the very expensive registrars - conveniently overlooking the existence of registrars like Internet.bs and (apparently) Porkbun that have a very low margin.
Of course, pretending that only the really expensive registrars exist, is a great way to prop up their misleading marketing spiel about how they're gonna save everybody from those evil overcharging registrars...
Ya I meant PorkBun and NameSilo have very small margins. We can see just how low now that CloudFlare has given a window into the actual cost to registrars. Of course it didn't take long for a few smart fellows to accumulate it into a full list.
I read CloudFlares blog announcement and it really caught me off guard. Makes it seem like most registrars are living fat off the domains. Some are but anyone that's considering CloudFlare generally knows about NameSilo at the very least. They make about $1-3 a year off each domain which isn't a ton. Sure it adds up when your talking about 1-2mil plus domains, but companies like porkbun apparently only have about 200k domains. Running a company with even a small staff of 8-10ish off that would be very hard without the additional porkbun services to fluff it up.
With that said I'm greedy and would for sure switch it all over to CloudFlare but then I would email them or call them and request a change on all the NameServers because I don't believe they are the best choice in free DNS (In fact after monitoring their Free DNS for 1 year compared to the one I currently use they had considerably more blips of downtime). Although after that I wouldn't really need much else from them.
Unfortunately, I've not found that to be the case. People have fallen for Cloudflare's marketing spiel en masse.