Slashdot Mirror
Cloudflare Launches a Low-Cost Domain Registrar, Which Will Also Offer Free Privacy To Customers (arstechnica.com)
Cloudflare, which is celebrating its eighth birthday has announced yet another service: an at-cost domain registrar. From a report: While Cloudflare had already been handling domain registration through the company's Enterprise Registrar service, that service was intended for some of Cloudflare's high-end customers who wanted extra levels of security for their domain names. The new domain registrar business -- called Cloudflare Registrar -- will eventually be open to anyone, and it will charge exactly what it costs for Cloudflare to register a domain. As Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post this week, "We promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges." That includes the small fee assessed by ICANN for each registration.
Prince said that he was motivated to take the company into the registrar business because of Cloudflare's own experience with registrars and by the perception that many registrars are in the business mostly to up-sell things that require no additional effort. "All the registrar does is record you as the owner of a particular domain," Prince said. "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." Charging overhead for that sort of service, Prince said, "seemed as nutty to us as certificate authorities charging to run a bit of math." (Cloudflare also provides free SSL certificates.)
Prince said that he was motivated to take the company into the registrar business because of Cloudflare's own experience with registrars and by the perception that many registrars are in the business mostly to up-sell things that require no additional effort. "All the registrar does is record you as the owner of a particular domain," Prince said. "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." Charging overhead for that sort of service, Prince said, "seemed as nutty to us as certificate authorities charging to run a bit of math." (Cloudflare also provides free SSL certificates.)
Do they still have the bit about terminating accounts at their sole discretion? Cloudflare got into the censorship business in 2017, can't say that I trust them in 2018.
Censorflow CEO might wake up in a bad mood and ban you though. Hard pass if you like having your website available.
I was afraid I wasn't getting enough advertisements in my life. Thanks Slashdot!
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Repeat after me: It is not possible to own a domain on the current Internet.
Say it over and over until you get it.
If you don't like or trust CloudFlare but the WHOIS privacy protection is important to you, the registrar Porkbun also offers free WHOIS privacy, and their rates are reasonable. I've been slowly migrating my domains there for these reasons, plus their easy DNSSEC support.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Or are they all working for free over there?
There's a catch. In the cost, I mean. "At cost" is - not a business model I'd want to take to a bank.
By-pass shit like CloudFlare.
"Oh really?" - Nation States
I just paid $39.99 for a domain renewal that I had at Network Solutions, plus $35.99 "late fee" (late by 1 day), plus $15.99 private registration.
I was going to move to GoDaddy, but Cloudflare sounds nice.
They have the fewest ads, no upselling, and I can get in, buy, and get out in less than a minute. After the sale, then never send weekly emails either. Never, not once. /s
Like Don Junior.
Black Lives Matter is a racist organization.
Fixed that for you.
It didn't start out that way, but like so many well intentioned grassroots movements born out of genuine concern and love (in this case, a woman wanting to stand up for the memory of her mentally ill brother who was gunned down without justification or provocation by murderous police) it's been hijcaked and turned into a tool of divisiveness and hate.
ALL lives matter.
.de domains can be had for less than $2 a year, without bait-and-switch price hikes. The .de registry is operated as non-profit coop by network operators and hosters. The .de CC-TLD of Germany is the third largest TLD after .com and .cn.
I found that the only users of WHOIS privacy are scammers, spammers and blackhats by considerable margin.
Maybe one day their CEO will wake up and decide your domain shouldn't be online.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Regardless of whether you think this offer is made in good faith, your privacy is something companies can make money by selling. And they will, eventually.
Cloudflare isn't currently publicly traded, but it likely will be some day. And at some point, someone will invoke "the duty to the stockholders" as the justification for exploiting all company owned assets to the maximum potential. i.e. selling your information to whoever they choose. It's incredibly unlikely that their terms of service will prevent this in perpetuity, in a way that would survive a change in control or other genuinely permanent protections. What, you think they're going to be afraid to risk losing business from their "we don't make any money providing this service!" service?
If they are only charging customers the registry cost plus the ICANN fee as mentioned in the article, that means they are still operating at a loss if they 1) are accepting payment methods which cost money (i.e. credit cards, paypal, etc.) or 2) providing customer support to registrar customers. I would prefer they charged more to at least break-even since presumably they will do at least one if not both of these (they already accept credit cards for their other services). I have all my domains at NameSilo, which I really like, and while they charge a bit more than Cloudflare, at least I understand that they are making money and therefore NameSilo's domain registration service is sustainable.
I have used Cloudflare for years and really like them as well, but when a business announces pricing which would result in a loss or at best - not make any money, that makes me suspicious. I am left to assume they are counting on sales from their other services to make up for this - they are a business after all - beholden to investors who at some point expect ROI.
Cloudflare is stating "we promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges" - but that is not just a promise to "never" make money on domain registrations... if they are offering support for domain registrations or offer popular payment methods it is also a promise to always lose money on that part of their business. When a company makes a promise like that (i.e. unlimited bandwidth)... it calls for additional scrutiny. I'd be careful when considering Cloudflare for your domains - they have either not really thought this one through, or are rolling our their own bait and switch scheme.
Privacy should be 'free' by default, everywhere, every time.
Free Software developers of the world, open your eyes! Our communities are being raped, our work pillaged.
Detestable villains - mean spirited, bigoted, belligerent, vicious - are using underhanded tricks to force hypocritical "Codes of Conduct" on the projects we built.
The only purpose of these CoCs is to allow so-called "Progressives" to conduct witch hunts against anyone who opposes them. Thereby they plan to steal our work for their shadowy corporate paymasters.
You can readily tell these CoCs are not about "just being nice" - because they are ALWAYS supported by the very LEAST NICE, most aggressively mean and shamelessly bigoted people you can imagine.
If a project to which you contribute has been raped by CoC-mongers there is a simple solution: WALK AWAY. Never contribute again. If you have a patch almost ready, count the time you spent on it as a loss and throw it away. If you see a security issue, remain silent and do nothing. IT'S NO LONGER YOUR PROJECT. YOU ARE NOT WELCOME THERE.
If you are evaluating new software, don't even consider any projects burdened under the tyranny of a CoC. It doesn't matter if they are technically superior - just don't consider them. Never be openly political, always make up a technical reason for rejecting CoCed projects.
Don't argue in public about the CoC. Doing so only exposes you to needless risk. You might be dis-employed, blackballed, and even set up for a #MeToo purge. Just stay far away.
Comrades: Individually we are powerless, and easily crushed beneath the iron boot of Corporate Social Just-Us. But together in solidarity we are millions and we are strong. The Internet itself depends on our collective labor. If we stop working, the internet stops working.
Free Software developers, save yourselves and save your communities! Just WALK AWAY from any project with a CoC. Without our labor they are nothing.
I think it's well established that any software company cannot be trusted with the words "free" and "privacy" in the same policy, let alone the same sentence.
Cloudflare seems like the Amazon of web hosting. Lose money on paper, and continue swallowing up as much share in their market as possible until they're so big you can't refuse their services. It pains me how many web sites I visit (or used to) have all of their content flowing through Cloudflare.
I think the value in you is that you now can access their cloudflare and other services directly from the management console.
The free part is offset by the additional upswing in customers they will get who are ready to go with an existing relationship with them.
This will hurt godaddy and it's very difficult for godaddy to do the same and debase cloudflare's business.
If you are not paying for the product, YOU are the product. The fact that they are offering these registration services at cost and their other services cheap/free really makes me question their motives and what they are doing with the data they have access to as it passes though their services.
Please keep using bold text, as it allows me to quickly scroll past these comments. Thanks.
It's basically prejudice + power, both items need to present
This definition was invented by racist minority people who want to believe they aren't racist and have free reign to say whatever hateful, spiteful thing that they want.
So... If you give them money they give you this for "free"? What a DEAL!
When you buy a domain name these days for a small business, do you want to log into a separate site to manage 1) the website 2) the dns 3) the whois 4) cloudflare.
No of course not. You buy all the services from one place, and then you go on to buy the next website from them, and the next.
They can be the first to race to the bottom with domain name registration fees. Used to be you had to pay to get whois protection, now everyone has it for free. This is the good part of capitalism, the costs to "provide" this "service" are extremely low. It was never worth $10 as a service charge. Whats that for? so they can send 20% of the money to icann for me? And the rest goes to a few database edits by an automated program?
-
Don't want to live in fear of saying something "wrong" that a cloudflare employee/zealot might find offensive and decide to cease service. Contrary to hosting/ddos protection getting a domain from an unwilling registrar takes weeks.
I'd rather pay a premium to some "capitalist pig" that doesn't care about feelings and political agendas and is glad to take my money.
Right now I'm using 1and1 but the prices go higher and higher.
I looked for alternative solutions but they're all outrageously pricey.
Cheap domains, with privacy so they cant be tracked.. well done for thinking this one through.
> Used to be you had to pay to get whois protection, now everyone has it for free. This is the good part of capitalism
To be fair, they only started offering this for free when it became illegal not to do so in the EU...
and all your keys for your encrypted domain traffic. How could it possibly be bad?
In fact, every government, multinational corporation, political think-tank and financial institute should get right on this. Great idea.
No. Many companies offered it for free for years...
Your software is just crap - written in crayon, fictional... I'm going to continue using the Host File Engine as a punchline to a joke by mmell February 17, 2017
/. registered peers, then talk (from behind your FAKE NAME for your FAKE LIE of a "so-called" WASTED life) - ok? apk
Your premise that hostfiles are a good way to deal with advertising and malvertising is fucking insane - by JazzLad April 20, 2016
his hosts "program" is actually a broken batch file by xenotransplant August 10 2015
his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to be a laughingstock while consuming excessive amounts of alcohol by alexgieg September 25 2015
I like your tinfoil hat by Karmashock September 09 2015
that APK nut, I can't get him to stop talking about his piece of shit file by rogoshen1 Tuesday March 03, 2015
I personally use a HOSTS file blocker produced from a genius called APK by 110010001000 October 27 2017
APK
P.S.=> When YOU do better than THAT by our
This definition was invented by racist minority people who want to believe they aren't racist and have free reign to say whatever hateful, spiteful thing that they want.
You mean like "free reign"?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here? "I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ? /.ers & security pros SAY DIFFERENT: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS!
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here? "I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ? /.ers & security pros SAY DIFFERENT: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS!
many != all
No, that's a nice eggcorn. Especially if you want to add to the connotation of what you're saying, since they mean mostly the same thing but slightly different. Nobody's required to use predefined idioms here - new ones are fine.
No they don't. Not unless a monarch controls a country with leather straps.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Both are being used metaphorically, so neither thing would literally be true.
There's using a word metaphorically and there's using the wrong word. They aren't the same thing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."