Some time ago, I mentioned that I moved my domain registrar from GoDaddy to NameSilo. I came to the general realization that registry services were mostly commodities, so there was little point in paying more. GoDaddy charges fees for services that are standard on most registrars, such as privacy protection. They also add a hefty markup to fees charged by the top level domain registrar. NameSilo was a registrar that didn’t, and their markup was minimal. So I switched.
It wasn’t a huge amount of money that I was saving per year as I have only a handful of them; it was more the principle that I shouldn’t reward companies that provide overly costly services. And if you’ve been on GoDaddy, you know that’s their one true talent: marketing. They are constantly looking to nudge you into paying for extra services of dubious worth. Their site is so overwhelmed with internal marketing that doing common tasks like getting into cPanel becomes a multistep process that’s hard to find, probably because they want you to see pages of marketing material first. Obviously, GoDaddy is not subtle, and they seem to cater to web hosting newbies familiar with the brand and often with a deficiency of web administration skills.
It turns out though that by using Cloudflare’s registry service, you don’t pay any markup and popular registry services like domain protection and privacy are free. You don’t even have to sign up for one of their paying services to get the deal. It’s all explained in this blog post. They write:
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?
Some months back I transferred my condo association’s registrar to Cloudflare. For the moment, I’ve kept my other domains on NameSilo as the cost difference between their services and Cloudflare’s is pocket change. But likely at some point at my convenience I’ll move mine to Cloudflare’s registrar too.
Changing registrars can be a pain as it generally takes about a week and there is an exchange of EPP codes between the registrars. But if you are paying too much to your registrar, the time and cost are justified.
