I am transferring my domains to Cloudflare, I use these for the sole purpose of forwarding e.mails and GoDaddy are no longer offering this service without having to pay extortionate fees.
But in coming across to Cloudflare I am finding, even more so than GoDaddy (which has worsened in this regard greatly in the twenty years I’ve been with them), that the instructions, the web pages, everything is written for people who know what all the initials mean, who know the secret IT meanings assigned to English words which have proper meanings and all those other problems which strangle communication at this level with people who don’t work in IT or live and breathe these reassigned meanings.
I am going to look and see if I can complete the transfer of the domains, but I am hesitant about it all as so far I have found little that I can be confident with here.
Cloudflare is certainly a technical product, but really most domain registration, DNS and hosting services are to some degree. Cloudflare has decent and rather straightforward documentation. The Community is also quite active.
It is worth noting that while Cloudflare technically is a registrar, that is not the core focus of their business and domain registration is provided as an at cost benefit for domains that use Cloudflare DNS.
Whether or not is it going to be suitable for you depends a lot on your expectations. There is no one to call and no one to just “do it for you”. It is very much a self-service platform, even on the most expensive plans. If you are willing to learn and prepared to do everything yourself (or hire someone on your own to help you), than you may be happy here.
But what I’ve learned in transferring my domains is that every time I do it (there are five) the result is different. Different every time.
I really should be able to work my way through it, but why is there no ‘bulletpoint’ type instructions instead of lots of links which take you to lots of pages which don’t have what you are asking?
As for being what I want, yes, I understand it is what I want. Getting to use it the way I want to is the difficult thing. My point is that there’s really no need to be difficult, the world has got along without this problem for centuries, why now?
Transfers take a while to complete due to the multiple parties being involved. Approving the transfers along the way accelerates the process.
I see one transfer started for a .com domain. you may be able to accelerate the process by approving the transfer at godaddy. It shows in your dash as expired which is what we typically see with domains in transit.
The other 4 domains in your account are not available for transfer.
I cannot reproduce that different experience, what I can verify is the 4 domains in the account you are using here that show pending nameserver update are all active in a different Cloudflare account. Is that account also yours? If so, you need to login and transfer them to Cloudflare from that account. If you desire to have all 5 domains in one account, you’d need to complete the nameserver change on the other 4 domains to the two nameservers from cloudflare assigned to that account, you complete that change at godaddy. From there, you can transfer them in to one single cloudflare account.
And we’re here to assist if you have questions along the way.
But I was only asked for the ex-GoDaddy transfer code on two or three, the others I wasn’t asked. All of them… repeat, ALL of them have been approved for transfer out of GoDaddy, I have the transfer codes read to go when by some miracle I find a place to put those codes in.
As far as I know I only have one Cloudflare account, but who’s to know? The website is a shambles! Nothing is straightforward. And now I have to go away working for five days, so who knows what will happen?
Maybe someone can tell me how I locate the listing of my domains on this site?
I have seen it, but I can’t get it to repeat no matter what I do. I saw it when five had been listed for transfer and then I went off to transfer the fifth.
Did you happen to create an account using an Apple ID? I have seen this result in an unexpected second account when changing the email address on the account.
But I don’t know how to find my ‘account zones’… I don’t know what they are. And the only way I’ll find them is if there’s some kind of direct method of doing so.
No, I didn’t use anything from Apple. Nothing, I never have used anything from Apple.
It is a little hard to explain because you normally have nothing to do beyond sign in to your Cloudflare dashboard and you will see your zones listed as Websites. You can always click on Websites on the navigational menu in your Clouflare account dashboard. If you don’t see a domain on that list, it is not in that Cloudflare account.
I ask about ‘zones’ and find out you mean ‘websites’. Issue No 1.
And then I would think only about websites if I had a website, which I don’t. I have domains.
Okay, thanks for that. I did find from my ‘dashboard’ the list of my domains I’m awaiting completion of the transfers, but there’s no indication of the ones which I didn’t get the request for the transfer codes, nor do I see any way to pursue that further. It’s totally frustrating. I am trying to follow logic, but there’s no logic which corresponds to anything I’ve ever seen before.
Okay, now let’s go a little further seeing as I’ve had another look. Above you refer, as does everyone, to something which is abbreviated to ‘DNS’. This may sound naive, but I don’t know what the ‘DNS’ is, what the letters stand for, I don’t recall ever seeing that spelled out so it really makes no sense to me.
I can locate the list of my domains which are being transferred in, but there’s no apparent action on them (for the most part they are awaiting the nameserver updates, and they have been for 36 hours or more, but one is showing as ‘active’. It’s the first one I transferred, the transfer code was applied to it only minutes before another one’s code, but this one is ‘active’ all this time and the others aren’t. And it appears there is no way I can ask on this site except in this forum.
There is no step-by-step instructions on how to do anything, you start out to do something and come to a different brick wall each time.
In the account you are using here, you have one website active on cloudflare. The domain name for that website shows as pending transfer on this dashboard (dash) page, https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/domains. Transfers can take up to 5 days to complete (I’ve seen some take longer), that one appears to be in process for 2 days. The transfer was initiated shortly after it became active on your dashboard.
Also in the account you are using here, you have 4 websites that are pending a nameserver change. Those websites are pending in the account you are using here.
If you go to this page of your cloudflare dashboard for each of the 4 websites that are pending in the account you are using here, https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/:zone/dns/records at the bottom you will see the 2 nameservers assigned to that particular website.
The reason the 4 are pending being added to the account you are using here is that the nameservers that are in the process of propagating are incorrect. I noticed on this page https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/:zone/dns/records that the 4 that are pending have different nameservers assigned to them than the one that is active.
Are each of the domains to have different nameservers?
You see, I followed the instructions and I arranged for GoDaddy to change all of these things. They did this, but I did so on the initial instructions and so the same nameserver details would have been attached to each domain.
Like I said before, GoDaddy have completed everything ready for the transfer and allocated authorisation codes for all of the transfers.
What I got here from all of this is exactly as I named the thread.
