this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Knock on wood, I have not used them in quite a while.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 11 months ago (3 children)

My order of preference for domain registrars is:

  1. Cloudflare (doesn’t support all TLDs, unfortunately)
  2. Porkbun (does have wide TLD support, and has no-bullshit pricing, albeit higher than Cloudflare)
  3. Namecheap. They’re cheap and Canadian… no other reason than just a backup to have.
[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I’ve been using Namecheap for years and have been happy with it. Why do you prefer Cloudflare? Is it for easier integration with Cloudflare services? How’s the pricing compared to Namecheap?

Sorry for the interrogation lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Cloudflare sells domains at cost. So yes, cheaper than any other registrar (including NameCheap and Porkbun), except maybe those who sell domains at a loss as a promo to rope you in and then kill you on the renewals.

Integration into their stack is a nice side effect, but really inconsequential. You can have your domains registered with any registrar and have your DNS hosted by any DNS hosting provider. Heck, you can run your own DNS servers if you want to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Cloudflare could be the cheapest (without cross-financing) because they advertise their pricing as they don't add any additional fees to the ICANN fees. I never actually fact checked this though.

[–] Static_Rocket 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I really want to use porkbun but I don't want to write scripts to integrate a custom name server api into ddclient. (I know some people have written their own wrappers but they've yet to make it upstream.) Namecheap it is then.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Cloudflare will do DNS for domain suffixes that they don't support. I've never used Porkbun but as long as you can set custom nameservers then you can point it at CF and use all the tools they support.

[–] Static_Rocket 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I just don't like the idea of supporting a company as large as Cloudflare. That and their pricing system doesn't make a lot of sense. I have to wonder where they are making their margin back.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah I've wrestled with that too - I justify it to myself that they are so much smaller than Amazon or Microsoft but they are certainly not a small operation.

I also appreciate their participation in WinterCG and the dream of having interoperable runtime environments for serverless platforms. While I don't think it's quite there yet, I think it's a force for good to have a medium-sized player trying to push the interoperability that Amazon obviously isn't big on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Technically they won’t. They won’t host OpenNIC TLDs, for example. However, you can have your domain registered with any registrar, and as long as you specify Cloudflare’s assigned DNS servers for your domain (DNSSEC records can be set too), you should be OK.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Njalla is mine. I like the privacy protections they offer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

WHOIS privacy? Porkbun does that for free for all TLDs that support it.

I don’t think I fully understand how what they offer isn’t “ownership by proxy”. I suppose they promise not to release your info if police ask for it? On the other hand, they technically own the domains you register through them, so if they get repossessed (e.g. through legal bankruptcy proceedings), whoever their new owner is, will presumably also own your domains…

I’m probably not seeing something here, but this all sounds sketchy to me.