The following is a more in-depth guide on why and how I swapped out the domain registrar portion of my site’s tech stack over time.

What’s a Domain Name Registrar and how does it relate to my domain?

So, what is a Domain Name Registrar in the first place? In essence, it’s just a given domain name provider that end users like you or I can pay a fee to in order for them to create a domain name that we can use on the internet.

If you’d like to read more into the fascinating world of domain name management in which I spent the past 3.5 years a part of, check out my domain system walkthrough series, where we talk about the different actors in this system, and even build a dummy DNR ourselves (to get it actually working you’d need to pay ICANN and go through accreditation and sign lots of contracts, which is a bit much for a blog post series).

Why you should transfer your domain to Cloudflare

Some history: where we were in 2017

When I first looked around the domain registrar space back a couple years ago, I found a lot of shady sites, anti-consumer pricing mechanisms (I’m looking at you GoDaddy), and just general wonkiness when trying to use their services to, for example, point over to Digital Ocean, a cheap VPS host that I used at the time.

Namecheap was like a breath of fresh air though- there wasn’t any pricing gimmicks, pointing nameservers at somewhere else didn’t take 2-3 working days, and their support team was top notch if anything ever did come up. Plus, they were cheaper than the other registrars that were at least semi reputable.

In total, it costs $9.06 USD per year for a .com domain at Namecheap. For reference, their margin per domain per year is about $1.03 USD, whereas other domain registrars were egging each other on to breaking the $10.00 USD per year mark.

Where we are now in 2021

Even though I’ve worked on the Domains team at Squarespace for over 3.5 years, and built from the very first lines of code a domain name registrar from scratch during my time there, I still have a lot of love in my heart for Namecheap as a registrar, since they really did provide a ton of value to me when I was a student, for more than a fair price.

However, in 2018 a nuclear bomb was dropped on the whole domain industry when Cloudflare announced that they were launching their own domain registrar.

The reason why the launch was such a big deal? Cloudflare was going to charge no additional fees on top of the wholesale price of a given domain.

Let me repeat that.

Cloudflare was not charging any money for their domain registrar services

Cue the sound of a million business execs calling up their lawyers to see if there was any way they could stop this, as they realize that Cloudflare was coming to eat their lunch. This was Cloudflare firing the first shot to begin the war against the crazy pricing in the Domain Name Registrar ecosystem, and to add additional downward pressure on prices for end consumers like you or me.

Now, before we continue, it’s important that we keep the following in mind:

Domain names are commodities, and domain registrars are fungible

This fact may get lost due to some companies (cough cough) attempting to imply a higher “quality of service” or “premium”-ness to their domain offerings from their brand, but as far as you-as-a-customer are concerned, just because some providers charge a lot more, it doesn’t mean they’re actually adding anything of value for you.

At the end of the day, these offerings are all the same, and you should bargain hunt for the lowest cost among reputable domain name registrars.

Here’s what the breakdown looks like in table form when trying to register the domain HelloThereGeneralKenobi.com:

Registrar	Price per .com domain per annum	How I feel
Namecheap	$10.87 USD
Cloudflare	$8.03 USD
Wix	$12.95 USD
GoDaddy	$18.99 USD
Squarespace	$20.00 USD

For those of you that know me, you’ll know one of my favorite phrases is

But it's the principle of the matter

And so it was. That $2.84 USD per year in cost saving now meant something to me, as stupid as it is to write it out. At the end of the day, domains are essentially commodities past a certain level of expected service, which meant that it didn’t matter too much at the end of the day who was the domain registrar for us, as long as they were reasonably reputable, and had the lowest prices.

For the sake of the principle of the matter, I jumped ship from Namecheap for my .com domains and migrated them all over to Cloudflare, pretty much on the day that Cloudflare’s registrar became GA. It helped that I was already using Cloudflare anyways for their CDN and DNS offerings, so I knew that they had a high bar for quality and wouldn’t be likely to have any issues.

The only fear I have is that I haven’t ever had to call into Cloudflare’s customer support before, so I have no idea if that experience would be a positive one like at Namecheap, or if I’d be bounced around in an AI chatbot for 30 minutes before getting to talk to an overworked human.

That uncertainty is definitely now a known unknown, all for the known known benefit of having $1.03 USD more each year to spend on dubiously clean ethnic food. That’s like 1/4 of a cha-siu roasted pork meal at Wah Fung, or 1/5 of a halal meal if you swing that way.

How to transfer your domain from Namecheap to Cloudflare

1. Head on over to your Cloudflare dashboard. you’ll notice a handy-dandy button for Cloudflare’s Registrar over on the right-hand side

2. We’re transferring our domain from Namecheap, so select the Transfer button

3. Since we already use Cloudflare as a CDN for this website, we can simply select the domain(s) that we’d like to transfer in, and then hit the Confirm Domains button

4. Now you’ll see a transfer info page- open up a new tab when you get here (don’t close this current Cloudflare tab!)

5. In your new tab, head on over to Namecheap’s domain dashboard. If your WHOIS privacy is turned on, turn it off (I believe this step is required)

6. Click over to the Sharing & Transfer tab

7. At the bottom of this tab, you’ll see this Transfer Out section. Go ahead and click the Unlock button to unlock your domain for transfer

8. Then click Auth Code, which will bring you to this menu where Namecheap asks you for an optional reason for why you’re leaving. Feel free to let them know, or tell them nothing, and then click the Send Code button

9. Head on over to your email to grab your transfer code, and copy it

10. Then head back over to your original Cloudflare tab, paste your trasnfer code in, and then hit Confirm & Proceed

11. Fill out your contact information, and then click Confirm and Finalize Transfer

12. You’re almost there! Cloudflare will send a message in the background to Namecheap via the Domain Name Registry in the background, but it may take Namecheap a couple minutes to receive the message, since it depends on their EPP message polling rate

13. After about ~5-15 minutes, you’ll receive an email from Namecheap saying that the transfer was initiated, and that it would take up to 5 days. THIS IS A SHADY CUSTOMER RETENTION TACTIC. To avoid waiting 5 days to transfer your domain, and just transfer now, click the link in the box below (yes, the message description is deliberately misleading- the page it brings you to will enable you to both cancel the request OR immediately approve the transfer, without waiting the full 5 days)

14. When you click that link, you get brought over to this selection page. Click the Approve button in order to finally confirm your domain transfer to Cloudflare, which should occur almost instantaneously (unless the underlying domain name registry is having issues).

15. This last page means that you’re good to go, and your domain should now be transferred to Cloudflare, where it’ll renew without any additional costs going forward!

So, what’s the final verdict on migrating over to Cloudflare Registrar?

It’s been 100% worth it, though do keep in mind that sometimes it’s cheaper to keep certain domains at other domain name registrars, since that registrar may perpetually keep a TLD’s price lower than the registry-cost, in order to act as a continual loss leader to draw in customers for their other TLDs

E.g. it’s cheaper for me to keep .io domains at Namecheap than at Cloudflare, since even though Cloudflare is at the wholesale price, Namecheap just has a constant discount for .io domains by a few bucks that puts it down below the wholesale cost.

I won’t lie, I got more than a bit of satisfaction from having a large company like Cloudflare call it like it is, instead of pretending like most of the domain registrar ecosystem. This quote in particular from their blog post announcing the launch of Cloudflare Registrar sparked so much joy and vindication when I first read it:

The thing is, registering a domain is a commodity. There’s no meaningful difference between any of the existing mass market registrars. Each top level domain registry (TLDs like .com .org .info .io, etc) sets a wholesale price for registering a domain under them. These prices are known and remain relatively consistent over time. All the registrar does is record you as the owner of a particular domain. That just involves sending some commands to an API. In other words, domain registrars are charging you for being a middle-man and delivering essentially no value to justify their markup. The more we looked at it, the more crazy the whole market looked to us.

No, Cloudflare, you’re not crazy, the world is- so thank you for launching something to bring some sanity back to the world.