Namecheap I find is less easier to use and sometimes higher cost over time. I also haven’t had reliable domain renewal service from them when I used them.
Granted this is all a few years back. I was at Cloudflare until this year when I switched to Porkbun and I’ve been very happy
I tried porkbun after comments like yours when one of my domains needed renewal, but had to transfer out after one year when their payment gateway refused to work and was very poorly handling the situation while my domain risked expiration.
Nameserver lock in. While I use Cloudflare right now for most things, I value the decoupling. Cheap way to make sure that my services aren't in total control of my domain.
I also like supporting a Ukrainian company. Only downtime I had was when their offices were being bombed, and they were quick to both restore services and make their infrastructure resilient to future such… interference.
Yup, I've been migrating out of Gandi because of this, I was okay with up to ~50% over the base price but I'm seeing 100%~200% overcharge. I did have to let go of one domain though since Cloudflare doesn't support .jp yet
You're stuck with cloudflare nameservers¹, so if you want to change nameservers you need to transfer them to other registrar, how much of a deal breaker this is is up to you, to me is project dependent.
> 6.1 Nameservers. Registrant agrees to use Cloudflare’s nameservers. REGISTRANT ACKNOWLEDGES AND AGREES THAT IT MAY NOT CHANGE THE NAMESERVERS ON THE REGISTRAR SERVICES, AND THAT IT MUST TRANSFER TO A THIRD PARTY REGISTRAR IF IT WISHES TO CHANGE NAMESERVERS.
there are very few parts of that contract in all caps, but that's one of them :/
That's annoying. For some use cases, not a big deal. But I have used the AWS Route 53 'alias' functionality on a number of occasions and that requires the use of Route 53 nameservers.
I've helped move a few domains from Gandi to Cloudflare. The move was relatively straightforward (couldn't get the Gandi records export to import into Cloudflare so had to do it manually...), and the new domain and renewal prices are lower.
To replace Gandi email (that Gandi went from free to ramping up the pricing for when they were taken over), Cloudflare offer email forwarding so you can receive incoming mail from a custom domain to e.g. a gmail account, and for sending mail you can pair this with a custom SMTP service like https://www.smtp2go.com (1000 emails/month on the free tier).
Apart from that, DNS is something I barely touch for years sometimes so I don't find much difference between registrars beside their pricing and how much you can trust them.
Being able to point your Cloudflare nameserver records would be nice though, so worst case you'd need to move everything if another registrar had some services you were interested in? Would be curious to know more about how common this scenario comes up and why.
You should check out something like DNSControl. Makes switching or having multiple easy. I have mine going to a bind zone file and cloudflare, and use the bind file for Unbound
I’ve got about twenty domains listed with them. No problems after 2-3 years, but I do wonder whether it’s a good idea to use the same vendor for DNS and domain registration.
Normally a registrar isn't going to have top tier DNS infra so you may as well separate, yes. Exceptions might be CF/Google/AWS/DO, but personally I don't like to use the big guns as registrars in any case. I use Namesilo and never had any issues but on the other hand have never run into any of these sorts of issues either..
I am happily using them for all of my domains they support. The problem with Cloudflare registrar is that they flat out don't support many domains/tlds.
