That to me is a downside since that means that that is not a core part of their business. Financially, it makes no difference to them if I use their service or not.
I would rather pay a little extra to a company that has domain registration as a core part of their business and actually makes a profit from me.
And domain names are cheap. Even if you pay twice as much as the cheapest service, it still will not make any difference in your bottom line.
The counter is it's also risky to use a company that only does Domain Registration since it's a very low margin business and thus the risk for them shuttering is higher -- or they'll try to make it up with various erroneous fees
I know the concern of putting all your eggs in one basket is real, but since CF's business is literally to take over your domain DNS and slap on some add-on services, adding domain registration in-house seems like a good fit.
> The counter is it's also risky to use a company that only does Domain Registration since it's a very low margin business and thus the risk for them shuttering is higher
You can avoid this issue by going with a registrar that focuses on bulk domain sales (eg. internet.bs in my case, but there are more, like eNom I think?), as they have a high-enough volume that they can easily stay afloat even when charging reasonable prices and without aggressive upsells.
It's mostly the consumer-focused "$1 for the first year" registrars like GoDaddy that you want to stay away from. Those are the really problematic ones.
> but since CF's business is literally to take over your domain DNS and slap on some add-on services, adding domain registration in-house seems like a good fit.
Sure, if you want to send all the traffic of all of your users through a man-in-the-middle US-based company with a very dubious past and a questionable business model revolving around basically centralizing the internet.
It's not a great recommendation to make. It also raises the question of why they seem intent on killing off the registrar market by offering "at cost" (which honestly isn't much lower than what aforementioned internet.bs charges anyway).
How about mixing the two? Buy your domain at the cheapest registrar you can find. Pay for 9 years. Then as soon as you can transfer to some registrar you have more long term confidence in. You might have to purchase another year there to do this.
Net result: You get the domain at your preferred registrar, but you get 90% of the savings you would have got if you had it at the cheap register.
Ah yes that's true, I always seem to group .io in with the new crowd of TLDs in the sense that it became trendy "recently"; and I only mentioned .io domains since GitBook uses one, "gitbook.io".
.io isn't just "Indian Ocean", it is British Indian Ocean Territory. The location of the Diego Garcia military base (jointly operated by US and UK). The British expelled its indigenous population (the Chagossians) to make way for the US military. The territory is claimed by Mauritius, and the International Court of Justice in 2019 ruled (in a non-binding opinion) that the UKs separation of the territory from Mauritius was unlawful.
Some random British company convinced IANA to let it run the .io domain for their own profit. Their operation of it has nothing to do with the interests of its exiled inhabitants (the Chagossians), the British territorial and military authorities, or the US military presence which constitutes the the territory's raison d'etre.
I think it likely that, one of these days, something is going to happen to the .IO ccTLD operators. Their rights to it are very dubious, and someone else (the British government, the government of Mauritius, the Chagossians) could end up wresting it from them.
What makes me uneasy about Cloudflare's registrar service is they force the use of Cloudflare's nameservers unless you have an "Enterprise" plan (paying a monthly fee for what amounts for some registry EPP calls?!) and given how they sell at cost I can't imagine the customer support in case of similar issues to this being good.
That to me is a downside since that means that that is not a core part of their business. Financially, it makes no difference to them if I use their service or not.
I would rather pay a little extra to a company that has domain registration as a core part of their business and actually makes a profit from me.
And domain names are cheap. Even if you pay twice as much as the cheapest service, it still will not make any difference in your bottom line.