According to a report this morning on TechCrunch, CloudFlare is expanding its footprint in the domain name registrar business. The article states that CloudFlare aims to offer low-cost domain registrations. It already offers registrar and domain name management services to enterprise clients.
Here’s an excerpt from the article describing the offering, with a quote from CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:
“After announcing the Bandwidth Alliance yesterday, the company today announced the Cloudflare Registrar. This new domain registration service promises to only charge the wholesale price that the top-level domain registry (think Verisign) charges. Typically, registrars charge their own fees on top of that and try to upsell you to a hosting plan or other services that you likely don’t need.
As Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince told me, this new service isn’t meant to be a loss-leader. “We took a look at this and said: every single Cloudflare customer needs to register their domains,” he told me. “And I’ve never heard somebody say: I love my domain registrar. We hope to create the first domain registrar people love.””
From my perspective as an investor, the registration cost of domain names is lower on the list than things like customer service and security. My assumption was that domain names are typically sold inexpensively in order to up-sell higher margin services like hosting, privacy, security products…etc.
It will be interesting to see what impact CloudFlare’s entrance into the low cost domain registration space has on other domain registrars and hosting companies.
Today’s poll asks if you will transfer names to CloudFlare in light of this news:
https://domaininvesting.com/daily-poll-will-you-transfer-domain-names-to-cloudflare/
Will keep an eye on their low-cost offerings. I will be moving to them if they bundle it with advance DNS services free.
What is “advanced DNS services”? They offer full control over your domain settings if you have your domain with their NS. It has been a great option for years, especially for some ‘nasty’ CC TLDs, where for example registrars charge extra for letting you control MX records (which you need to have your own email with the domain).