Registrar Disappointment

Website, Application, Performance Registrar
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Hi All,

First, let me start by saying I love the services Cloudflare offers, I’ve migrated 4-5 different businesses in my area all to Cloudflare, and generally they are happy, but with one thing that always comes up.“Why do I still need this other registrar? Can’t we just put everything onto one platform?”. They are referring to the fact that often a large percentage of their domains, often their main one, is a .ca domain, which is not yet supported on Cloudflare.

I was around when Registrar first launched, and was super excited about the service. I was in one of the first batches of users to get access to it, and moved many domains to the service as soon as I could. This was December 2018. When I first started getting that question about not being able to register .ca domains, I had a very confident response. “They don’t support and Country Code TLD’s yet, but don’t worry, it’s a priority for them, and I’m sure it will be supported soon!”

I watched the forums, looked at TLD Policies every few months, hoping to see just a single ccTLD available. Six months turned into twelve months, turned into eighteen months. Not a single ccTLD, not a single update from any Cloudflare staff. Community moderators like @sdayman and @domjh repeatedly telling people asking about their specific country TLD to refer to the TLD Policies page, and that there are no updates as to when they will be. This is certainly not their fault, they’re simply providing all the information they know, but this is no longer an acceptable answer. It was acceptable eighteen months ago, it was maybe still acceptable twelve months ago, but now, a full 2 years since the launch of Cloudflare Registrar, “we don’t have any update” is no longer acceptable.

If there had been even a single ccTLD added in the past two years, I could have thought “Oh look at that, they are working on it, I hope my ccTLD is next!” but given there have been none added, I’ve begun to lose hope.

I’m not asking for all ccTLD’s to be added overnight. I am aware there are systems to configure, probably contracts to sign, I’m sure it’s a process, but simply providing no answer to one of the most frequently asked questions on this forum is very disappointing. Just look through the Registrar Category at all the questions from people about “when will X ccTLD be supported” or “can I migrate X ccTLD to Cloudlfare?”

It’s worth pointing out, on that TLD Policies page, there is a line that has been there, since launch, unchanged. It reads:

Cloudflare is committed to supporting all available TLDs, with a focus on expanding country-code TLDs, and are working to expand this list. Check back soon for updates.
It’s hard to say you’ve succeeded in your mission when your “focus” has had what appears to be zero progress in 2 years.

One of the reasons I love Cloudflare as a company is their transparency. They provide detailed breakdowns of things they’re working on, or whenever there is an outage a detailed blog post is published about what happened and what is being done to fix it. Where is the same level of transparency about one of the most key aspects of a registrar? It almost seems like registrar features were added, mostly implemented, then the whole team got shuffled off to work on other things, leaving the service so close to finished, but still incomplete.

My hope is that someone at Cloudflare see’s this post, and shares it with someone who can provide some sort of answer. Any communication would be helpful at this point, some sort of explanation as to what has been happening the past 2 years would be nice, and what is happening going forward would be great.

When Matthew Prince posted on the Cloudflare Blog about Registrar, it was introduced as “Domain Registration You Can Love”. Well, I’ve tried to stay positive and love this service, but at this point my general feeling is disappointment.

Thanks.

2 Likes
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Is there an acceptable answer I should provide, or should I just ignore such posts?

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Hi @tylerg,

Unfortunately, we don’t have any control over what Cloudflare do and don’t do and are just going off public information and what we have been told. I would love to be able to tell people exactly when their requested TLD is available, but unfortunately we don’t know ourselves! I am personally waiting for some country code domains, but I have no idea when/if they will be available.

We keep seeing infomation saying they are working on it and that they are coming “soon”, which is what we relay to those who post here. This is a community of mostly other Cloudflare users like you and me, so although some staff may see this, I doubt you will get an official response here. I also doubt you will get an extimated time from support, they do not currently tend to announce TLDs they are working on until they are available.

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I do get that you guys are providing all you know, as I mentioned I’m certainly not blaming you or any other Community MVPs.

It’s simply frustrating as someone who wants to really love the service to be strung along with promises of “soon” but no details, and never from any official source.

@sdayman I think you’ve been doing a good job, and didn’t mean otherwise, sorry if it at all came across that way. I think simply being honest any saying we have no idea when or if they will be available is all we can do.

As you mentioned as well, I also don’t really expect an official response here, but I’m really just hoping maybe someone might see this, ask a few questions to the right people, and whatever is holding up the process gets unblocked. Maybe someone shares this post with a contact who can do something about it.

Alternatively we get a message saying “We’re sorry, we don’t know that we’ll be able to add any ccTLDs, so don’t count on them”. This to me would be totally acceptable as well. I would obviously be disappointed, but at least I’d have an answer and can move on. It’s the stringing along, “it’s our focus and we’ll have something soon!” messaging that drives my frustration.

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While I used to be excited about the prospect of moving some of my ccTLD registrations here, I’ve since found a great boutique registrar for them and would be quite content to keep them there, even if it costs me an extra $10/year per domain to do that.

Should they finally become available here, I’m ambivalent about taking advantage of it. As Cloudflare isn’t making any money from registrations, I doubt they care where I register my domains, and it’s just less work for them.

Short answer: Don’t hold your breath. Find somewhere else if you don’t like your current registrar. You can probably do better.

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And that summarises it.

The registrar service is a nice gimmick and the fact they sell at cost price is well and good, but it’s still a gimmick and not real competition to other registrars. There simply are too many limitations and features missing.