The common IT norm for getting domains at cost is to get it from Cloudflare, but you’re free to host your site here with that domain.
It is? I don’t see any reason why Cloudflare is better over other providers. In fact, I would dock Cloudflare a few points due to the lack for nameserver support.
Their prices are decent, but nothing special:
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Hi Greenreader9,
It isn’t.
Well, they deliberately prevent people from pointing nameservers away for their commercial benefits (obviously) 
Having the ability to point NS away would mean they do not have DNS control over the domain and thus the entire stack of CF products means nothing and they’ll be doing free labour of maintaining the domain.
Some other registrars do offer domains at prices even lower than ICANN fees but often require signing up with them for more than 1 year. To some extent it might be a great deal as they can have domains cheaper with bulk purchase on their end.
Cheers!
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So then why is Cloudflare the ‘common IT norm’? You are the first person I have ever heard say that.
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It might differ when it comes to online, but that norm is from offline IT communities here in my location.
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I split the posts to a separate topic. I don’t think this is helping the original questions asked in the other topic. Especially two weeks after the last post.
Maybe in your circles, registering domains with Cloudflare is common. But I personally am a bit hesitant about using Cloudflare due to the nameserver support. Sure, I do use Cloudflare nameservers so it doesn’t really make a difference, but I don’t like to be locked in.
Also, most people I know IRL register their domains with a Dutch domain provider. TransIP is very popular. They are definitely not cheap, but they are known and trusted, have good customer support in our native language, and support iDeal and direct debit, which are the most common methods of paying online around here. Having a credit card (or debit card which can be used online) is not guaranteed, which is a barrier to use foreign domain providers.
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Any type of lock-in is anti-consumer I agree.
For Cloudflare, they have this “transfer-out” thing that makes you move to another registrar just to re-gain access and control to nameservers, and an additional year of domain extension (if that matters for some).
Any good registrar should have this transfer function. But the extended year doesn’t comes from nowhere, as you actually have to pay for transfers.
If there’s no transfer then it’s actually a lock-in. There’re many registrars doing this, glad that most registrars I know doesn’t do this. 
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EVERY registrar is REQUIRED to provide this. If they hold your domain name hostage, they are in violation of ICANN regulation and it won’t be long before they are not a registrar anymore.
How transfers are supposed to be offered is heavily regulated and standardized, registrars don’t have flexibility in that. Registrars are not allowed to deny you the ability to transfer out your domain name.
Which ones and in what way? Because as far as I know, they are not allowed to do this.
I have seen some cases where they skirt the regulations with extra checks and delays (e.g. having to call support to get the EPP code), but actively prohibiting you from transferring your domain is not possible.
IMO if you’re being forced to use other services of a company to host a domain name you have registered with them, that’s lock-in. Many hosting providers offer domain name registration services, but wouldn’t think of requiring you to host your website with them. But that’s a similar vein of what Cloudflare is doing, which rubs me the wrong way.
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There are way too many, but I do not want to name them due to SEO considerations. Some would make it super difficult for one to transfer domains away especially a subset of cheap hosting companies. They go as far as adding a heck ton of additional unnecessary verifications to access the support account specifically for domain transfers, then with a bunch of shit talking where you get past their sales, upselling and whatever they has to offer with hours of padding in between then finally got that bloody EPP code to have the transfer approval email also sent to them to either get rejected and start the whole damn thing again, or wait until the last second for their upstream domain reseller ((cough) *nom) to finally take action on behalf of the reseller to transfer it over.
Yes, technically they didn’t lock you in, but they will *k with you in every possible imaginable ways. The best part, they deliberately make things longer if they know your domain in near expiration, until that point you’ll know you’re toast before the ballet even starts.
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Just don’t share a link. If you put it in pre formatted text (~~~), a backlink won’t be created.
The forum also uses “nofollow” by default, although I do forget at which user level that is removed.
You can also just add a space between the name and TLD too.
That’s why I don’t understand why you think they are the “norm”. They clearly don’t offer all features, you quite literally have to find a new provider if you want to do stuff. They don’t offer any extra stuff that other registrars don’t either.
From my experiences, NameSilo is the registrar that people here in the US like (If they know what they are talking about that is). Personally, I’ve used Network Solutions, NameCheap, and NameSilo, and I like the latter the best. No, they are also not the cheapest around, and yes, there interface is quite bad (Half the site is new, half the site is quite old), but the ease of use and support access more then makes up for that.
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The norm also considered to use Cloudflare free CDN for acceleration so having the domain registered with them and hassle free has made things much easier. I guess for you having the ability to change NS is very important due to the way things are setup here, but since CNAME is now available, NS is not as that important. NS should only be important when one is considering transferring domains over to another provider rather than used as a verification method.
Nameserver settings often take too long to recover and cause huge downtimes, while CNAME is just instant if you use Cloudflare, using other providers might be similarly instant fast but still Cloudflare did better in terms of DNS.
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That’s some BS pricing right there, if I had $125 I might get some TLDs altogether.
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Right, so when you say “lock you in” you are mostly referring to lengthy processes and ridiculous fees? I’m pretty sure that they are not allowed to outright forbid you from doing so, but I don’t know about charging fees for outbound transfers. I’ve never seen a company do it (the worst I’ve had to do is make a phone call), but you may have.
That said, despite multiple people stating it, I still don’t have any verifiable evidence of any particular company doing it.
It hardly makes thing easier. The difficult part of integrating Cloudflare is not changing the nameservers, it’s setting the right DNS records. Knowing which records to set up to link one or more services to your domain is difficult, replacing one set of nameservers with another is not.
If you think changing nameservers is difficult, I think you should not be using Cloudflare. Instead, you should be buying domain and hosting in the same place so there is one point of contact who can help set everything up.
And since Cloudflare doesn’t provide full website hosting (Pages and Workers are not for people without technical knowledge), Cloudflare cannot be this easy to use, one-stop-shop domain/website/email service.
If done properly, a nameserver change causes no downtime. Just make sure the source and target nameservers have the same records before switching over and nobody will notice the change. Even if it takes a week for the nameserver change to be processed, it doesn’t matter, because your website will resolve regardless of which nameserver the visitor queries.
Also, how fast a nameserver change is processed is determined by the registry, not the nameserver operator. Cloudflare can only control what happens if visitors query Cloudflare’s nameservers, they cannot control if or when they will. Which nameservers your domain has is controlled by the registry nameservers, and how fast the change at your registrar is processed is up to the registry.
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It seems that Admin is very precise on terms — While most of us refers to “registrars” as whatever sh*t you can purchase domains from, Admin explicitily refers to “ICANN Accredited registrars”. So our definition includes “Resellers” which is, oh my god, such a messy place. There’s no regulations and they can just do whatever they want, including putting your domain behind ridiculously high pay walls and support walls.
“ICANN Accredited registrars” might also do this, but I haven’t see any. Maybe as Admin said, it won’t be long before they’re no longer “ICANN Accredited registrars”.
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If you, as a company, want to register domains directly with the registry, you must be a registrar. As a registrar, you are responsible for ALL domains you register that they follow the registry regulation. If you choose to have resellers, that doesn’t change that fact, and you are still responsible for making sure your resellers abide by the registry regulation.
Being a reseller is not a free pass from regulation. If you find companies breaking registry regulation, you could check which registrar they are under, and try to get the registrar involved in correcting that. There should be a contract between the reseller and registrar that enforces compliance to the rules. At worst, the reseller’s contract may be terminated and the domains moved to another reseller or the registrar directly.
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Is charging $125 to transfer domain breaking the rule?
Anything we can do about it?
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ICANN’s information is a bit… conflicting about this:
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/name-holder-faqs-2017-10-10-en
My registrar is charging me a fee to transfer to a new registrar. Is this allowed?
Yes. Registrars are allowed to set their own prices for this service so some may choose to charge a fee. However, a transfer cannot be denied due to non-payment of this transfer fee.
So they can ask you to pay but not force you to pay?
According to the same FAQ:
My transfer request was denied for a reason not listed above, or I do not agree with the reason my registrar provided. What can I do?
If you think your request to transfer your domain name was inappropriately denied or you do not agree with the reason (if any) provided by your current registrar for denying your request, you should then submit a formal Transfer Complaint with ICANN.
What I get from this is that if they force you to pay a transfer fee, they are in violation and you can report the registrar to ICANN for this violation.
For resellers, I would first try to contact the registrar about this. Although the registrar is responsible, they may not be aware of the violation committed by their reseller, and a good registrar will appreciate you for working with them instead of setting ICANN on their tail.
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In the position of ICANN, they tend to have downstream entities solve issues first before reaching them, and in most cases this shelters downstream bad-actors, as they can delay as long as they want and take no action but call it in progress until the domain either expires or just have them revoked. Worse of all, since they had the ownership anyways, keep holding on to the domain and claim it for sale, which is what *ugeDomain and sometimes *oDaddy has been doing a along.
Speaking of bad actors, NameSilo has caught my attention recently for sheltering multiple domains that involves mass SMS phishing campaigns and yet they refuse to take timely action on abuse reports, maybe a bit of social media noise would motivate them into doing something about typosquatting domains.
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