My experience with Registrar has been 4/5 okay and 1/5 horrible so far.
I transferred five domains from Namecheap, and four of them went through within an hour. The fifth was in a pending status. I was charged a one year renewal for each ___domain as part of the transfer process.
The fifth ___domain hadn't transferred after a few days so I filed a support ticket. They told me it could take up to 15 days.
After roughly 30 days, I was billed _again_ for a one year renewal of that ___domain which is still on Namecheap (unlocked), and still pending transfer. Registrar has now charged me $90 (.io ___domain is $45/year) for a ___domain _which they do not control_, and this has obviously not been reflected in the ___domain expiration date.
I contacted support again and they issued me a $45 refund, but the ___domain is still not transferred... not sure what to do at this point. (ticket #1657921 if anyone from CF is reading this)
Sorry about the billing issue; that's really frustrating. We've been working on a migration of our billing systems, but that has led to some cases of double charges which are unacceptable. Working to make that right now and glad the refund was successful.
I'm looking at your ticket now; will make sure this gets solved today.
This is precisely my fear. Cloudflare is using price as a selling point.
For people with just a few domains, price isn't important.
I have 5 domains with hover.com. I'm happy to pay a couple of bucks extra per year to know that there's real support. I can call and get an answer in 10 seconds.
Granted, I've never needed to call support, but losing my ___domain would be a huge disaster with no website, no email, and cost me hours of time. I see no reason to risk anything to save $5 a year
Every time I've thought about moving away from Namecheap to something else I've remembered those once in a blue moon times I've actually needed to reach out to support for mission critical type of events. The support I've received has been absolutely stellar. Above and beyond what I would have expected to be their scope of service. I don't know any other providers I hold as highly in support, especially anything coming from a tech company.
My main gripe is that I wish they would include free SSL and they give their UI some love but that's minor as I only access it on certain occasions.
I dislike Namecheap for a few reasons. They don't let you log in with a _valid_ username and password if you are using a VPN. Their UI is pretty bad, too. If you have an adblocker, you don't see "Submit" buttons on a lot of forms (editing WHOIS information, etc.)... lots of small annoyances with their service.
I've been a customer of hover for a couple of years now. I've transferred as many of my GoDaddy domains to it as I could without affecting any running services (email mostly). And now I have 35 domains on hover. I'm happy to pay the increased price just because the UI doesn't change.
I don't mean to dogpile on CF here, but that same thing happened to me. I got my refund, but it put me off transferring my ___domain to them. Luckily it was a .net ___domain, so it was only ~$8x2 not $45x2 as in your case.
I'd still understand being frustrated with $8. We're asking you to trust us with your ___domain's registration and that starts with handling the charges for it in the right way. We're going to fix that.
One drawback to using Cloudflare Registrar that wasn't obvious to me at first is that you have to use Cloudflare's nameservers. Not that I blame them for it, but it'd be nice if the marketing page made this detail more obvious.
I've chosen to pay an extra $0.50 or so per ___domain to Porkbun for the option of using other nameservers.
I've moved some domains to Cloudflare Registrar not knowing this limitation. I asked them about it and the support person said they are targeting Q1 2019 for this feature. Now that we're approaching that date I'm not sure they'll hit that.
I've also had a billing issue with Cloudflare Registrar. I transferred two domains and paid the renewal fee, and two months later was charged for the same domains again. They've since issued a refund after I raised a support ticket (still waiting on that to hit my card), but the fact that it happened at all is worrying to me.
Granted I was in early access so I expected some things not to be polished yet, but these are pretty critical areas to get right as a registrar. And since my billing issue happened just last week I doubt that issue has been fixed with the general release.
So I'm going to hold off on transferring more domains until it matures, or just stick with Gandi.
I apologize for the billing issue. I understand how frustrating that would be and it's well below our standards. We're working as a team to make that right and earn back your trust now.
This is exactly my experience as well. It hasn't been such a problem because I use CloudFlare as my DNS provider, but not having the option is problematic. It's less "CloudFlare Registrar" and more "CloudFlare lock-in service".
Yeah, I found this irritatingly problematic, and it means if I have a DNS issue to my host, I may need to leave Cloudflare just to troubleshoot it.
There's several other features I find missing compared to a more mature registrar, but hopefully they'll get there eventually. For now, I'm moving my low-importance domains over to it for the cost savings, but will keep my primary domains under GoDaddy.
This seemed obvious to me, in that I can't see why you would want to use Cloudflare as your Registrar if you weren't using their DNS services. I've always switched my DNS services over to Cloudflare as soon as I've bought a ___domain, so for me I like having the easy integration of Cloudflare managing the ___domain and the DNS records.
I had a good experience moving a ___domain to Cloudflare, but one thing is still bugging me:
To allow a third party to modify the DNS (eg pfSense dynamic DNS client) you have to use an API key that has full access to modify everything in your Cloudflare account. You can’t limit the type of operation and you can’t scope it to a ___domain. That’s nuts.
Note that for some reason, Cloudflare charges substantially more for .io domains than other registrars. Cloudflare charges $45 whereas Dynadot charges $26.99 and Porkbun charges $28.97.
.io is heavily subsidized by most registrars for a couple reasons: the .io registry offers substantial volume discounts and .io domains are associated with a higher spend on add-on services. In most cases, they discount .io domains because they hope users spend more on other upsell products.
I've been in the beta for months, but it's a bit annoying...5 months in and you still can't register new domains. The ___domain management is also pretty confusing, because it's all jumbled together with the DNS interface. They need to have 2 interfaces, even if they are interconnected.
Thanks for the feedback. Working on new registrations now; focus at launch was to help users of Cloudflare's DNS services find a better alternative to ___domain registration.
Does Cloudflare Registrar support U2F authentication yet? I don't trust any service with mission-critical stuff that doesn't have U2F. Domains are way too valuable to keep them in registrars without U2F.
Just curious, what are the ___domain registrars currently support U2F?
Also, just to be sure U2F is an additional methods of 2FA, not the only method of 2-step, so to me having U2F is not necessarily making accessing your account securer.
The prime thing U2F mitigates is phishing attacks. You literally cannot be phished with U2F, you try to auth against the wrong ___domain and you get a different secret - so they can't then pass that on the backend (i.e. the real site) and login as you.
Sure your TOTP might remain, but you're not using it, so it's not liable to be taken.
Construct a phishing site that gives some vague error message about being unable to connect to your device, and offer the TOTP fallback. How many people will fall for it?
"Literally cannot get phished" is woefully far away, because the phishing-resistant property of U2F has a giant hole in the side of it (fallback factors) and therefore still relies on human vigilance.
I do use U2F though, because it is pretty convenient.
Why in particular? Plenty of other registrars offer .uk or the public suffixes under it like .co.uk and .org.uk
The Nominet requirements do cause these to break mysteriously much more often than some generic TLD spun up yesterday by people convinced this is a gold rush (e.g. my registrar offered me a great renewal deal for a .co.uk I control, I pressed "Yes please" and then their system believed I had taken the deal but didn't renew the ___domain, after a few days they confirmed that the deal makes no sense for .co.uk and refunded the money, they had forgotten to blacklist Nominet when adding their deal feature), but it works well enough most of the time.
“Some registries do not allow domains to be registered with WHOIS Redaction or WHOIS Privacy. Many of these are country TLDs (ccTLDs) like .uk. Cloudflare does not yet support TLDs that prohibit WHOIS redaction, but we will in the near future.”
Nominet is a bit of closed-shop with strong links to existing UK-based registrars. I may be too cynical but I just get the feeling that they'd see Cloudflare as too much of a threat?
New GTLDs may cost considerably more at Cloudflare Registrar.
For example, the annual cost of a .space ___domain during transfer is $15.18 (it was $17 two months ago), while renewal for the same ___domain at Namecheap costs $9.06.
To be fair Namecheap lists it as a discounted offer, but that appears to be always the case for the .space TLD renewals.
If you can find it for $15.18 without having to buy other services, that's a deal and you should take it. Most discounts like that are offered as loss leaders in the hopes that you'll buy other add-ons.
For a customer it's irrelevant that the discount is a loss leader. The end result is that I can renew a .space ___domain for half the price at Namecheap, without having to buy other services.
Understood... personally, I'd rather pay the extra dollar or two in order to NOT have to click through promotional crap during registration. I don't know about cloudflare's process, but I'm assuming it'll likely be as clean as google's (by comparison).
ive been using njalla for some time now with good results. Not too keen on being told what nameservers i need to use, and they do an excellent job with privacy (PGP encrypted messages and bitcoin payment for example)
Off topic, but something I've wondered for a while. Maybe someone here knows :)
Years ago (13, to be exact) when I was young and didn't know anything and couldn't afford to buy a parked .com that made more sense, I registered a .ws ___domain at Godaddy of all places. It has subsequently become the e-mail address I use for everything.
Unfortunately, .ws doesn't really allow transfers. Now that there are all these non-evil registrars popping up, I'd like to switch to one of them, but I can't. Does anyone have any ideas about what if anything I could do? I suppose I could by another ___domain and forward the e-mail, but the whole point of having my own ___domain was that I wouldn't have to switch again :(
> Can I transfer my ___domain to another registrar?
> Yes, .WS ___domain transfers may take place in accordance with ICANN's "Policy on Transfer of Registrations between Registrars". Please contact the registrar you would like to transfer to for instructions on how to proceed.
This has made news a few times but I will not use them for my domains.
It's been a few months since launch, but I still can't use my own nameservers for the domains.
While the registry-pricing can often workout cheaper, some registrars negotiate nicer deals with the registry. I have a .me ___domain for 8 years that I never paid the registry standard price, it has always been sent discounted rate.
While I'd love to switch, I switched to google's a couple years ago, and the killer feature for me, is free mail forwarding with the ___domain (no mail server setup). I've got a bunch of domains I don't really use anymore, but want to be able to receive the mail for a couple addresses.
May consider moving most of my domains over all the same though.
They don't support even .us, which is a pity. When I start a new project, I register with another registrar and wait 60 days to move it to Cloudflare - what a nonsense! NameBright has similar pricing - for .com at least.
Presumably by hiding the origin server. But that can be done by other technologies too, so it's not unique to CF. But I'd like more details from thinkcomp.
They get you to sign up, give your credit card, use their nameservers, and then if you get any serious traffic, they will conveniently be there to offer extra features with a paid plan. In my opinion, this is exceptional marketing.
Cloudflare's entire business model is positioning themselves as the middleman to every part of the internet.
They don't host your site, but they'll mirror the front-end on their CDN to speed it up. They'll handle your DNS and TLS certs, and even your ___domain name, even though they aren't (yet) in the business of selling either.
Pretty much everything Google and Amazon offer as side services Cloudflare offers for free to some extent, and then charges for enhanced versions of those products.
The major issue with this is that the transferred ___domain must use CloudFlare NS and be on the platform. Really not worth the lock-in for like $1/year you save off other places.
Been looking to transfer my domains away from Godaddy but can't find a registrar I like that accepts .ws, which is my main ___domain. Cloudflare doesn't either :\
I have domains on namecheap and would like to transfer to CF. Does the transfer process involve disabling whois, temporarily exposing my personal details to the internet?
Some registrars will block transfers if certain types of privacy protections are enabled (or they'll require you expose your data to the public in order to give you your auth code).
Namecheap can block transfers with WHOIS Guard enabled in some cases; as soon as it is transferred to Cloudflare, though, the info will be redacted.
Contact information is redacted by default. I've moved a bunch of domains over, they're all redacted in the whois without me taking any action. It lists the registrar as Cloudflare. It shows the ___domain updated date, the creation date and registry expiration date. There are no contact details listed at all. And it shows the DNS servers (in this case the Cloudflare LOU and MAY name servers).
In fact the sole problem I've had, is with another registrar. I've had my domains with GoDaddy for 15 or 17 years. I've never had a problem with them, so it was fine, but they've begun seriously pushing their prices up (now about double what Cloudflare is charging). All the transfers from GoDaddy to Cloudflare went super smooth, took minutes, except for one high-value ___domain I've owned since the 1990s. GoDaddy is quasi attempting to hold that hostage, they put it through some kind of manual transfer intervention that will take a week to complete (hopefully).
Before you register your ___domain with Cloudflare, please consider who their other customers are. Cloudflare today provides services for many white supremacist websites; they kicked off the Daily Stormer in 2017 after widespread criticism, but still receive money from many others.
From what I can see, their senior leadership genuinely believes that, morally, they have an obligation to provide services for horrible people in exchange for money[1]. If you agree, use them! But if you think it's bad to defend these sites in an era of white nationalist terrorism, look elsewhere.
If they had not kicked stormer I would be jumping on this - unfortunately it shows me that it's another service that can not be trusted to remain a neutral dumb pipe. Even worse they showed the world that they can be used to take things down / offline.
The day that happened I lost faith in American Internet, and actually now advocate for regulation of registrars and companies like cloudlfare - when you corner so much of the market (through low pricing using google's resources and others) for protecting transmission of data / information and you start blocking data on whims - you are no better then [insert other censorship regime here] -
they are not the only ones, godaddy has shown itself as a censor for various groups and so have others.
I can understand refusing to be a host / disabling hosting, but as far as data transmission, ___domain name registrars and similar internet functions, it should be let everything through and don't get involved imho.
You don't change peoples opinions by shutting them out, all that does is drive them deeper into their own echo chambers. It's usually a bad idea in practice.
Freedom of speech means freedom of speech you don't agree with. There is no need to protect speech most people disagree with. FYI, the ACLU has also protected the same people you refer to. The problem with taking away civil liberties, is that eventually it will come down to losing your own.
For example, if you want the government to shut down speech it doesn't like, what happens when opposing views are in power, and Donald Trump decides he doesn't like what YOU are saying. Do you really want to go there?
Considering how much traffic flows through it, you really think they don't have the more power than most governments?
And while, the First Amendment doesn't provide protection from private parties, it is still possible to agree with Free Speech rights as a private company, even if you disagree with the message. The problem is when you start shutting down conversations, you become part of the problem.
The likes of Twitter and Facebook, as an example are FAR more powerful than any government or localized platform traditionally protected, and may be considered Private Spaces for Public Use, which have been defined before (ref: Occupy Movement).
Just because you are a private entity does not mean you are free to do anything you want. The government has LOTS of limitations on what businesses can or can't do. Unless you are suggesting that businesses should never have to comply with disability laws, or laws regarding other protected classes too?
I transferred five domains from Namecheap, and four of them went through within an hour. The fifth was in a pending status. I was charged a one year renewal for each ___domain as part of the transfer process.
The fifth ___domain hadn't transferred after a few days so I filed a support ticket. They told me it could take up to 15 days.
After roughly 30 days, I was billed _again_ for a one year renewal of that ___domain which is still on Namecheap (unlocked), and still pending transfer. Registrar has now charged me $90 (.io ___domain is $45/year) for a ___domain _which they do not control_, and this has obviously not been reflected in the ___domain expiration date.
I contacted support again and they issued me a $45 refund, but the ___domain is still not transferred... not sure what to do at this point. (ticket #1657921 if anyone from CF is reading this)