That's fine, you just have to admit you're supporting an incredibly slimy business. That's okay, many of us do/have done that even when we don't want to, but at least you gotta tell others to offset your GoDaddy use. Two people swayed away from using it by your opinion should just about do it!

I think most business are slimy if you dig deep.

I'm curious what the reasons are. I moved ~60 domains from Gandi to Namecheap and then back to Gandi over the span of 10 months. Namecheap was cheaper, but their support wasn't as good and their UI is a disaster (IMO).

Both times I had all domains moved over in less than 24 hours.

Can you say more about how this works? I find it intimidating. And I don't understand how the cost works -- if I'm in the middle of my term with the first registrar, do I get a refund when I move it over? Like when you moved from Gandi to Namecheap and back in 10 months, does that mean you paid 3x registration, or did you get proportional refunds when transferring?

this depends on the tld. for most tlds you buy another year of registration on transfer and thus extending the expiration.

for example for .de domains though, the remaining time on your registration is dropped and you start fresh from the transferal day.

For .pl the transfer is free, but it also does not extend expiration period (it stays the same).

I used to have about 50 domains there and moving everything to Cloudflare was pretty simple. Just start using it as a DNS first, which I was doing anyway.

Then the transfer process takes about 2 minutes per domain so the whole process was done in a little over an hour.

I thought Cloudflare had a deliberately manual (and therefore more secure but also more expensive and slower) process for registering domains. Has that changed?

I didn't have much issue with the process, it seemed like any other. A local business is a friend of mine, they were paying too much for too little from their previous web host/dev so I transferred the domain name to CF and ran their WordPress "business card" type site through a static site generator, placed all the files in GitHub, and pointed CF Pages at the repo. Whenever they want to make changes, they spin up the current state of WordPress in LocalWP, make the changes, I run it through the static site generator and push the files to GitHub. Takes them a few hours of messing around to get their content right and takes me 5-15 minutes to jamstack it to GitHub. Free hosting and cheap/simple DNS.

That sounds interesting. Which static site generator?

(Currently happy with the bitnami wordpress image, but wouldn't mind going 100% static!)

Not OP, but I just downloaded one such WordPress business card website with wget and put it into S3/CloudFront.

We offer a zero-markup registrar on self-service platform also - https://blog.cloudflare.com/registrar-for-everyone/

Ah, cool :)

Registering domains is very fast. To transfer a domain Cloudflare insists that you use them for DNS, but I already do that.

For the transfer it’s just like anywhere else. Initiate the transfer, get the code from the other registrar and wait for it to go through.

>> To transfer a domain Cloudflare insists that you use them for DNS

That feels… slimy…

I mean, 99% of the reason to have a domain with Cloudflare is their DNS/WAF/CDN and the options you get from having them at the edge. If CF isn’t handling your DNS they can’t provide those services without some very specific configurations that aren’t for the faint of heart.

You can use anybody as a registrar if you don’t want those tools though. CF sells domains at cost so it’s not something they aren’t making money on.

I had this problem. Then I learned that Hover has a concierge transfer-in service. You give them your registrar creds, they do the work of transferring everything seamlessly for you.

Sure, it’s Tucows, but it’s not GD.