Cloudflare Registar, is there a catch?

Darkle

The other day while I was modifying some things in the DNS of one of my domains, I stumbled upon a section of my account that I had not seen until now called Cloudflare Registar, I guess Cloudflare invests $0 in advertising (which makes sense) about this feature because it has been active for years and I had never heard about it.

Basically as you might have guessed from the name it allows you to register and transfer domains at the lowest price I've ever seen, as it's exactly Cloudflare's wholesale cost $8.03, it's damn low and Cloudflare doesn't really make any profit on it so I don't really know if maybe there's any downside, because I haven't found it, it even comes with default privacy protection.

I would like to know if anyone around here tried this service and can tell us what their experience has been like.

010101

Darkle I feel like cloudflare just does things like this. One day we could discover we were all wrong, but they seem to just give a lot away. One of the few remaining services that gives so much for free (or low cost) and it’s a great service.

Once upon a time Google was like that. They gave a whole lot more away for free. But, then they let corporate folks come in and they are slowly being destroyed.

tankerkiller125

I've transferred all of my compatible domains to them when the service was in private beta. I have had zero issues or downsides as someone who uses Cloudflare for DNS. The downside would be that you can't use other DNS providers.

thimiraonline

I am on it. No issues. Low cost. Paid for 8 years.

Darkle

010101 Very interesting reflection, I agree 100%, Google has become very distorted over time moving further and further away from the normal user, at first it seemed a change to approach a more "professional" way but now as you say is literally corporate.

In the case of Cloudflare I feel that they have built their business around this strategy and its growth has been very organic, it works very well for both ordinary users and companies and all this is not a fantasy, it's economically sustainable (the stock market performance confirms it), so I hope it continues like this for a long time.

Darkle

Hello, I have revived this discussion because I got an email, it turns out that since yesterday Cloudflare Registrar is now open for everyone and I'm not talking about transferring domains (that could already do everyone), I'm talking about registering new ones directly, an important step for Cloudflare Registrar!

Here is the complete post from the Cloudflare blog in case you want to take a look: https://blog.cloudflare.com/registrar-for-everyone/

JohnP

The only 'catch', if you want to see it as such, is that (unless something changed with this new launch) you can't point the domains at any nameservers apart from using Cloudflare's DNS.

One little thing that I find irritating is that if you search for a domain that has a TLD they don't sell at the moment, instead of telling you that they don't sell it, they just tell that the domain 'is not available' which sounds as if someone has already registered it (to me at least).