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.)
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.)
Terms of Service? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
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Pick up the phone? What am I, a caveman?
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Were you a free user or paying customer?
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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"? :-)
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i think you'd better look up the meaning of the word 'chivalry'.
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i think you'd better look up the meaning of the word 'chivalry'.
Considering the accusations against the president, judge Kavanaugh, numerous CEOs, etc. these days, chivalry really is at issue these days.
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normal human sociosexuality
As defined by whom? If it was so normal, then why would so many people perceive it as abnormal? Sounds more like a creep trying to justify his own misunderstanding of the world.
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"As defined by >10,000 years of human law."
Do you mean it's abnormal behavior then?
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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.
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The bit where they actually use it, I assume.
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Name one registrar that isn't.
As Storm Front found out, the aren't any.
As long as they CEO personally likes your content! (Score:1)
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!
Re:Read this today. Truth! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's basically prejudice + power, both items need to present
This definition was invented by racist minority people who want to believe they aren't racist and have free reign to say whatever hateful, spiteful thing that they want.
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This definition was invented by racist minority people who want to believe they aren't racist and have free reign to say whatever hateful, spiteful thing that they want.
You mean like "free reign"?
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No, that's a nice eggcorn. Especially if you want to add to the connotation of what you're saying, since they mean mostly the same thing but slightly different. Nobody's required to use predefined idioms here - new ones are fine.
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No they don't. Not unless a monarch controls a country with leather straps.
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Both are being used metaphorically, so neither thing would literally be true.
Fine words butter no parsons (Score:2)
There's using a word metaphorically and there's using the wrong word. They aren't the same thing.
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What makes it the wrong word? Because it's not part of a standard issue idiom and you can't stand variations?
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Domain names have always been leased. When did you ever own it?
Alternatives (Score:1)
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.
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If you don't like or trust CloudFlare, then how could you possibly like an SJW operation based in Portland, Oregon?
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There's also DreamHost.
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The Cloudflare business model has always been to get more of your traffic to flow through them, for example the DDOS "protection" that entails CF having your TLS cert private key. Access to your data is undoubtedly being monetized in various ways that they won't tell anyone about, plus the odds that they're in bed with the US intel agencies are roughly 100%, so probably funding comes from that direction in the guise of gov't contracts.
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I did my own research but you can just have fun looking at these two links and figuring it out for yourself; the highlights I noticed is that they respond to USA subpoenas, that they can but usually don't tolerate resource abuse, and follow US laws:
https://www.cloudflare.com/tra... [cloudflare.com]
https://www.cloudflare.com/pri... [cloudflare.com]
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By-pass shit like CloudFlare.
Anyone who attempts to create an internet that the US and 'Five-Eyes' nations cannot control and cannot ID and track down those using it will be destroyed, or outright killed as a last resort.
The US government and other Western governments like the UK and EU well know that the internet is one of, if not the greatest, threat to their authoritarian power and hegemony if not tightly under their control and monitoring.
Strat
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Right. Whereas Vlad the Lad thinks it's the best thing since rubber mattress covers.
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I'm sorry that you wish for a place where you can order murders with impunity
It already exists.
It's called "government".
I want a place where I can securely communicate with others to organize to peacefully change the government so it no longer routinely engages in things like murder, parallel construction, and warrant-less domestic surveillance to serve the political and ideological agendas of those in power.
Strat
About time, move away from Network Solutions (Score:2)
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.
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You're that braindead that you still use Network Solutions? Hopelessly stupid.
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GoDaddy is also overpriced for what is being offered. Especially when you look into SSL certs.
My advice: Go with offshore, small-time DNS registrar. This raises the barrier of entry for anyone trying to file frivolous take-down lawsuits. For DNS hosting, there are several reliable free providers. I go with hurricane electric (he.net). Never had downtime due to DNS hiccups.
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You need to look up nearlyfreespeech. Just renewed one of my domains there for $13. Adding privacy took it to $16 for a year.
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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).
Good. The wholesale prices are still outrageous. (Score:2, Interesting)
.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.
No bait and switch? No upselling? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:No bait and switch? No upselling? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
"Free privacy" (Score:2)
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Overly cynical (Score:2)
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.
The hackers will love this (Score:1)
Cheap domains, with privacy so they cant be tracked.. well done for thinking this one through.