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Privacy The Internet Technology

Cloudflare Launches a Low-Cost Domain Registrar, Which Will Also Offer Free Privacy To Customers (arstechnica.com) 122

Cloudflare, which is celebrating its eighth birthday has announced yet another service: an at-cost domain registrar. From a report: While Cloudflare had already been handling domain registration through the company's Enterprise Registrar service, that service was intended for some of Cloudflare's high-end customers who wanted extra levels of security for their domain names. The new domain registrar business -- called Cloudflare Registrar -- will eventually be open to anyone, and it will charge exactly what it costs for Cloudflare to register a domain. As Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post this week, "We promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges." That includes the small fee assessed by ICANN for each registration.

Prince said that he was motivated to take the company into the registrar business because of Cloudflare's own experience with registrars and by the perception that many registrars are in the business mostly to up-sell things that require no additional effort. "All the registrar does is record you as the owner of a particular domain," Prince said. "That just involves sending some commands to an API. In other words, domain registrars are charging you for being a middle-man and delivering essentially no value to justify their markup." Charging overhead for that sort of service, Prince said, "seemed as nutty to us as certificate authorities charging to run a bit of math." (Cloudflare also provides free SSL certificates.)

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Cloudflare Launches a Low-Cost Domain Registrar, Which Will Also Offer Free Privacy To Customers

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  • Terms of Service? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30, 2018 @06:35PM (#57400682)

    Do they still have the bit about terminating accounts at their sole discretion? Cloudflare got into the censorship business in 2017, can't say that I trust them in 2018.

    • Re:Terms of Service? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30, 2018 @06:44PM (#57400724)

      This.
      They banned me in 2017 without explanations. "Fraud". A website for a small minecraft server.
      Talked with their "Trust & Safety" Admin, but he was having a bad day.
      I am still banned today.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Were you a free user or paying customer?

      • They banned me in 2017 without explanations. "Fraud". A website for a small minecraft server.

        That's a weird name for a minecraft server website. Was it "Fraud.com" or ".org"? :-)

    • by Anonymous Coward

      What ones don't have a bit about terminating accounts via their discretion? It's a pretty standard item in most TOS's I've seen.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Name one registrar that isn't.

      As Storm Front found out, the aren't any.

  • Censorflow CEO might wake up in a bad mood and ban you though. Hard pass if you like having your website available.

  • Yay! (Score:2, Insightful)

    I was afraid I wasn't getting enough advertisements in my life. Thanks Slashdot!

  • If you don't like or trust CloudFlare but the WHOIS privacy protection is important to you, the registrar Porkbun [porkbun.com] also offers free WHOIS privacy, and their rates are reasonable. I've been slowly migrating my domains there for these reasons, plus their easy DNSSEC support.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If you don't like or trust CloudFlare, then how could you possibly like an SJW operation based in Portland, Oregon?

    • by Dwedit ( 232252 )

      There's also DreamHost.

  • I just paid $39.99 for a domain renewal that I had at Network Solutions, plus $35.99 "late fee" (late by 1 day), plus $15.99 private registration.

    I was going to move to GoDaddy, but Cloudflare sounds nice.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      You're that braindead that you still use Network Solutions? Hopelessly stupid.

    • Godaddy sucks big time. Look at namecheap or ghandi, or other places but not godaddy.
    • You need to look up nearlyfreespeech. Just renewed one of my domains there for $13. Adding privacy took it to $16 for a year.

      • by pnutjam ( 523990 )
        I've got no privacy paid for, but for some reason my nearlyfreespeech registered domain, in my email, shows no contact info... Other domains I registered do.
    • by nickjj ( 4795255 )

      Check out https://namesilo.com./ [namesilo.com.] .com domains are $8.99 all the time and it includes free private registration for life.

      It's $1 more per year than Cloudflare except it's available now and includes free email forwarding (which Cloudflare does not).

  • by Anonymous Coward

    .de domains can be had for less than $2 a year, without bait-and-switch price hikes. The .de registry is operated as non-profit coop by network operators and hosters. The .de CC-TLD of Germany is the third largest TLD after .com and .cn.

  • by caffeinejolt ( 584827 ) on Sunday September 30, 2018 @08:34PM (#57401010)
    If they are only charging customers the registry cost plus the ICANN fee as mentioned in the article, that means they are still operating at a loss if they 1) are accepting payment methods which cost money (i.e. credit cards, paypal, etc.) or 2) providing customer support to registrar customers. I would prefer they charged more to at least break-even since presumably they will do at least one if not both of these (they already accept credit cards for their other services). I have all my domains at NameSilo, which I really like, and while they charge a bit more than Cloudflare, at least I understand that they are making money and therefore NameSilo's domain registration service is sustainable.

    I have used Cloudflare for years and really like them as well, but when a business announces pricing which would result in a loss or at best - not make any money, that makes me suspicious. I am left to assume they are counting on sales from their other services to make up for this - they are a business after all - beholden to investors who at some point expect ROI.

    Cloudflare is stating "we promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges" - but that is not just a promise to "never" make money on domain registrations... if they are offering support for domain registrations or offer popular payment methods it is also a promise to always lose money on that part of their business. When a company makes a promise like that (i.e. unlimited bandwidth)... it calls for additional scrutiny. I'd be careful when considering Cloudflare for your domains - they have either not really thought this one through, or are rolling our their own bait and switch scheme.
    • by n3r0.m4dski11z ( 447312 ) on Monday October 01, 2018 @01:12AM (#57401608) Homepage Journal

      When you buy a domain name these days for a small business, do you want to log into a separate site to manage 1) the website 2) the dns 3) the whois 4) cloudflare.

      No of course not. You buy all the services from one place, and then you go on to buy the next website from them, and the next.

      They can be the first to race to the bottom with domain name registration fees. Used to be you had to pay to get whois protection, now everyone has it for free. This is the good part of capitalism, the costs to "provide" this "service" are extremely low. It was never worth $10 as a service charge. Whats that for? so they can send 20% of the money to icann for me? And the rest goes to a few database edits by an automated program?

  • Privacy should be 'free' by default, everywhere, every time.
  • I think it's well established that any software company cannot be trusted with the words "free" and "privacy" in the same policy, let alone the same sentence.

    Cloudflare seems like the Amazon of web hosting. Lose money on paper, and continue swallowing up as much share in their market as possible until they're so big you can't refuse their services. It pains me how many web sites I visit (or used to) have all of their content flowing through Cloudflare.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Cheap domains, with privacy so they cant be tracked.. well done for thinking this one through.

The 11 is for people with the pride of a 10 and the pocketbook of an 8. -- R.B. Greenberg [referring to PDPs?]

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