[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> It's cheap, at-cost

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.

[OzzyB]

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.

[joepie91_]

> 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).

[tzs]

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.