Cloudflare launches the world's first no-markup domain registrar

[Arthur]

To get early access sign up here: dash.cloudflare.com/domains.

 

More info: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-registrar

 

“I love my domain registrar.” Has anyone ever said this? From before Cloudflare even launched in September 2010, our early beta customers were literally begging us: "Will you please launch a registrar too?!" Today we're doing just that, launching the first registrar we hope you’ll be able to say you love. It's built around three principles: trust, security, and always-fair pricing. And it’s available to all Cloudflare customers.

 

Needing Secure Domain Registration Ourselves

Cloudflare has actually run a registrar for some time. Like many of our best products, it started by solving an internal issue we had. Cloudflare has several mission-critical domains. If the registration of these domains were ever compromised, it would be, in a word, bad.

 

For years, we worked with our original domain registrar to ensure these domains were as locked down as possible. Unfortunately, in 2013, a hacker was able to compromise several of the systems of the registrar we used and come perilously close to taking over some of our domains.

 

That began a process of us looking for a better registrar. Unfortunately, even the registrars that charge hefty premiums and promise to be very secure turn out to have pretty lousy security. We ultimately decided the only way to get the level of security we needed was to build a registrar ourselves.

 

Custom Domain Protection for the Ultra High End

A handful of our customers noticed we had our own registrar and asked us about it. Those conversations turned into our Enterprise Registrar product with Custom Domain Protection for our most security-conscious clients. Every client using Custom Domain Protection defines their own process for updating records. For instance, if a Custom Domain Protection client wants us to not change their DNS records unless 6 different individuals call us, in order, from a set of predefined phone numbers, each reading multiple unique pass codes, and telling us their favourite ice cream flavor, on a Tuesday that is also a full moon, we will enforce that. Literally.

 

That, obviously, doesn't scale. As a result, we charge a significant premium for our Custom Domain Protection product. (If you're interested you can learn more about it here.) Running that, however, has helped us define a set of best practices that we think every registrar should follow. And that got us thinking: can we build a better registrar for everyone?

 

What Consumers Hate About Their Current Registrar

With a good idea on how to build a more secure registrar we asked our customers what they hated about their current registrar. Two phrases kept coming up: "bait and switch" and “endless upsell.” If you've ever registered a domain, you know the drill. You get a discounted price when you first register, but with each renewal the price soars. In the best cases we've found, it's around two times the original offer. In the worst, it's more than twenty times. It's gross. That’s in addition to the constant upsells for other products that either should be included for free (for example, DNSSEC) or that you just don’t want (for example, worthless trusted site seals).

 

The thing is, registering a domain is a commodity. There's no meaningful difference between any of the existing mass market registrars. Each top level domain registry (TLDs like .com .org .info .io, etc) sets a wholesale price for registering a domain under them. These prices are known and remain relatively consistent over time. All the registrar does is record you as the owner of a particular domain. 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. The more we looked at it, the more crazy the whole market looked to us.

 

[...]

 

The Cloudflare Registrar Promise

Today, on Cloudflare’s 8th birthday, we’re giving all our customers a present: a registrar they can love.

 

Here's the promise of the Cloudflare Registrar: we'll follow the best possible security practices and offer you the best possible price. What do we mean by that? From the security side, we promise we'll allow you to enable two-factor authentication, we’ll lock your domain registration by default, and automatically enable best-practice security services like DNSSEC.

 

From the price side it’s even simpler: we promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges. That’s true the first year and it’s true every subsequent year. If you register your domain with Cloudflare Registrar you’ll always pay the wholesale price with no markup.

 

For instance, Verisign, which administers the .com TLD, currently charges $7.85 per year to register a .com domain. ICANN imposes a $0.18 per year fee on top of that for every domain registered. Today, if you transfer your .com domain to Cloudflare, that's what we'll charge you per year: $8.03/year. No markup. All we're doing is pinging an API, there's no incremental cost to us, so why should you have to pay more than wholesale?

 

You may be able to find a cheaper price somewhere else under some promotion. But, ultimately, there's a wholesale price that the other registrar must cover so inevitably you know there's going to be a bait and switch — with the price getting jacked up in the future — along with endless upsells.

 

Cloudflare Registrar will also be offering personal data redaction on WHOIS, that meets current ICANN guidelines, for free. Broadcasting the registrant contact information, via the WHOIS service, can invite mountains of spam to your personal addresses. Like your domain, your privacy should not come at a markup.

 

Edited September 27, 2018 by Arthur