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Comment by AnonC | Hacker News Reader

I know that Cloudflare people comment here. So can I go on a tangent and ask what’s holding up registering new domains through Cloudflare (posting on the Cloudflare blogs or community forums doesn’t get a response)?

Cloudflare registrar was announced (and released) nearly two years ago, allowing people to transfer their domains to Cloudflare. It was declared then that registering new domains would be coming soon. But here we are nearly two years later and there’s no sign that this is coming this year either. Meanwhile, the company even went public through an IPO. What’s the holdup and why the radio silence? I’d actually prefer a blog post about this on the official site than a “what should we tell and what shouldn’t we tell” response here.

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We’re thinking about this. What we don’t want are domain speculators buying domains cheap and then doing nothing with them. That’s all cost and hassle for us. We want to let you register domains that you’re serious about doing something with. We’re running a bunch of experiments to see if we can allow new registrations of domains people are serious about without opening the domain speculation floodgates.

What about the .me TLD? I've been waiting on that one for a long time as well, and it was alluded in the past it was soon™.

Any ETA for .dev?

Been waiting for .dev too. Haven't been able to get any info from them as to when it will be supported ):

I'm sorry but I don't buy it. Domain speculators who buy thousands and thousands of domains already get very cheap bulk pricing. Thinking that you would contribute to that problem sounds ridicolous. Also there's plenty of simple ways to prevent this if you wanted to. Like limiting the amount of domains per account, credit card etc. Put it in your TOS and kick people out who do it anyways. Come on...

You may not buy it, but that's the rationale. I'm the one vetoing us turning it on so you're literally talking to the decision maker. We've thought about everything you've suggested and it all feels artificially constrained (e.g., what if you have 11 domains that you really care about?). We're running a bunch of different experiments for different options. We'll open up domain registration at some point, but only when we're confident it lives up to our original promise and still accomplishes what's right for our business. We haven't figured that out yet.

Isn't speculation affected deterred by higher pricing? What is preventing you to add a "new domain" cost on top of the renewal?

As a customer I would be ready to pay a bit extra rather than go through the purchase at NameCheap. wait 60 days, and then transfer dance.

We could, but we promised we’d never charge more than the wholesale price. One experiment we’re playing with is bundling a highly discounted Cloudflare plan with new registrations. So you get registration at cost and a paid Cloudflare services at a significant discount.

Dual pricing for new vs transfers is industry standard. I'm happy to pay a one-off $1 fee for new registrations (and additional years/renewals are cost price).

I don't even think you've misled anyone by doing this, since it's essentially a new product (new domain registrations).

YEs just bundle something with the Domain, like adding $2 per domain while give you $5 of Workers Unbound Credit.

I'm aware of who you are but I have no qualms saying that I can't take this as a valid reason. And the example of 11 domains... do you really think this would have any noticeable negative effect on the domain speculation problem? Like I said, they already get those bulk prices. And 11 domains is a tiny number. The contrains are artifical yes, of course, what else could they be? There is no natural limitation here. I guess you ment arbitrary? It will always be arbitrary. Your suggestion to bundle it with a general Cloudflare plan is arbitrary just as well. There are many many ways you can try to lessen the problem. And I get it, bundling it with a budget plan makes sense though I'm not sure if one could 100% claim then that the domain registration is at cost-only. Then it's the same as any webhoster who bundles "free" domains into the mix.

The point of living up to the original promise: the original promise was to offer domain registrations at low prices. You are afraid to not live up to it? Well you don't because you don't allow registrations. You still have a landing page that advertises the service. You have call-to-actions called "register now" and the page [1] tells about new registrations and renewals. Then after clicking on it you land on a domain transfer page that doesn't really tell you that that's the only thing that works right now. So by being afraid to not live up to the promise you actually don't live up to it.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/

Wouldn't some basic rate limiting for new registrations do the trick? I rarely would register more than a domain or two a month for an actual use case. Maybe some logic to not ding you for also buying example.com, example.net, and example.org at the same time, but locking you to only a couple strings of "example" at a time?

I'd think you could just charge a couple of bucks more than the competition(which is justified for users through nice integration into your other systems), but which would be off-putting to speculators, who often operate using bulk purchases. I'm sure you've thought about it a bit more than me though!

I, on the other hand, want to transfer more domains I've already done something serious with to CloudFlare Registrar, but can't because the TLDs (.club, .dev, .pw, and .sh in my case) aren't supported.

https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/ says

Cloudflare is committed to supporting all available TLDs, with a focus on expanding country-code TLDs, and are working to expand this list. Check back soon for updates.

However, it has been saying this since the beginning, and comparing the current list to the October 2018 version (https://web.archive.org/web/20181025085340/https://www.cloud...), there are only 13 new TLDs:

  bet     Afilias
  black   Afilias
  blue    Afilias
  green   Afilias
  io      NIC.io
  kim     Afilias
  lgbt    Afilias
  mobi    Dotmobi (Afilias subsidiary)
  pet     Afilias
  pink    Afilias
  pro     Afilias
  promo   Get (Afilias subsidiary)
  red     Afilias

so really just one new TLD (.io) from a new registry, plus an Afilias (best known for .info) bundle. Still just a tiny number of registries, and almost no addition of ccTLDs despite the stated focus.

I wonder if you would be kind enough to shed some light on this situation?

im not really registering domains that i necessarily /know/ how i plan to use them yet, but more as vanity names i like and may want to use in the future--basically i tend to register the domain and then use it for some side project sometime after, since that lets me frontload some of the DNS configuration in advance. im using Cloudflare for the DNS part already for sure, so it's convenient to have both that and the registrar in one place.

totally get that something that enables my silly personal domain purchases more smoothly could be abused by squatters and that their use patterns could create unwanted support/engineering load you wouldn't want to deal with though, i think that's reasonable. the one thing i'd wish for is maybe being able to transfer a domain i've recently purchased elsewhere more quickly--as-is i think there's a waiting period before you can move a domain onto the Cloudflare registrar

GP here. This is a late reply to your reply, and am not sure if you'd see this. I get that you have an issue with domain speculators and squatters, but what I don't understand is how that's being prevented now. They could still buy domains on another site and transfer them over to take advantage of your lower prices and squat forever. So if you're not taking any precautions during domain transfer to prevent those people from transferring over (and becoming all cost and hassle for you), does it matter for new registrations? On the other hand, if you're taking some precautions to avoid such squatters in the domain transfer process, why not do the same for new registrations as well?

I feel as if I'm totally oblivious to what differentiates offering domain transfers from new domain purchases, considering that millions (or more) domains are already registered and squatted on now. A 60-day delay in transferring new domains isn't going to deter a squatter from buying new domains elsewhere and transferring it over to Cloudflare.

Could you please clarify if you see this comment? Thanks.

On the same note, domain billing on cloudflare is broken. Transferring 10 domains to them at the same time (all in the same cart) created 10 separate transactions on my credit card, one after the other. This got my CC flagged and frozen and I had to call in and confirm I authorized the transaction.

I can only imagine transferring in more domains, or when they start to renew. All these individual charges will freeze any linked CC and the renewals for subsequent domains will fail. So there is a chance you might lose your domain if you experience this and don't check your account.

There are many people who have experienced the same and written on their cloudflare community forum, some posts dating back years, and still nothing has been done about it.

Just letting HN know about the billing side of things when using cloudflare as a domain registrar.

I spoke to this team and they've got some work in flight that should greatly improve this experience. Sorry that you dealt with it.

Thank you for the help prdonahue

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