I manage web services for a good handful of businesses, and I migrated almost all of them to Cloudflare DNS over the past years. In order to simplify and streamline their (and my) operations, I’m considering moving more of their domains to Cloudflare as well, but had a few hesitations and would love some insight.
1 - New domain registration.
I use Cloudflare Registrar for about half of my domains, and have the ability to register new domains directly through Cloudflare. However, when I created an account for a new client, they can only transfer, and haven’t been able to register new domains. That meant when they wanted to register a new domain, they had to do so at GoDaddy, and then wait 60 days to transfer to Cloudflare. Not ideal, confusing for the customer, and also leads to them getting double billed. Does Cloudflare plan on allowing users to do new registrations again in the futute?
2 - External nameservers
In an ideal world, Cloudflare DNS and Cloudflare Registrar would be all my clients ever need and we’d never have an issue. However, I know better than to lock myself into a service, and want to make sure that if needed down the line I can move my client’s domains out of CF. While I know transfer out is supported (as required by ICANN regulation), not being able to change the namservers for a domain registered with CF before completing the transfer makes the process difficult, and can also lead to downtime during a transfer (unacceptable for most of my clients). In addition, CF for example won’t let you transfer in a domain before the nameservers have been updated, so transferring the domain to another service with the same requirement is impossible at this time. Does CF plan to allow changing the nameservers of a domain registered with CF Registrar, and is there a timeline for this?
3 - Transfer between CF accounts
The support page for CF Registrar has said for the past few years that Cloudflare is working to support transfers of domains between CF accounts, but it seems like this functionality still does not exist. Right now to do an inter account transfer you’d have to transfer to an external registrar (ie godaddy), wait 60 days, and then transfer back, and pay 2x registration fees. Is this feature being worked on?
4 - Long term support
Now that CF registrar has been available to the public for about 3 years, is CF going to continue to build and support the service? I understand that higher level customers have had access to it for longer, and have access to phone support for it, but for customers who don’t pay for CF DNS the support options are limited. Godaddy has lots of problems, but when I need something I can call and eventually talk to a person, which is not the case for CF registrar. I totally understand why CF can’t put all their resources into this product, after all they’ve committed to offering domains at cost and can’t make money off of it, but that makes me worried about the long term longevity of the service. And that’s also why I worry I may never see any of the above changes made, as CF rightfully doesn’t have any incentive to make them.
Given these concerns, I’m currently planning to keep customer domains away from Cloudflare Registrar, but would love any insight from Cloudflare regarding the future of this service!