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Comment by sfeng | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare Registrar, no markup and a reliable company.

The catch is that you must use Cloudflare's nameservers [0]:

  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.

[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/domain-registration-agreement/

That's extremely weird. Is there a publicly stated reason for it?

This usually isn't a problem, you can point the DNS to any hosting service you want. Its a pain to setup every single record of-course.

People generally use 3rd party Nameservers when their Registrar is unreliable or "old school".

Most dot-com era web companies used Network Solutions back in the day - and many still use them. However, DNS updates sometimes take hours, their interface is cumbersome, etc.

It's become quite common to use someone like Cloudflare for Nameserver/DNS duties (among other things) and keep your registrar where you like.

Recently switched from Namecheap to Cloudflare. Cloudflare was significantly cheaper for my sole .io domain.

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