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Cloudflare seeks to disrupt domain registration market with cut price new service
Content delivery network provider Cloudflare Inc. is seeking to disrupt the domain name registration market with a new service that promises to only charge the wholesale cost, without profit, for domain names.
Cloudflare Registrar, pitched Thursday as “domain registration you can love,” sees the company offers support for .com, .net and hundreds of other top level domains, at cost.
A .com domain name is offered by the service at $8.03, of which $7.85 is the wholesale fee while the remaining 18 cents is the ICANN fee, a mandatory fee imposed on top of domain registration by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
By comparison, leading registrars such as Namecheap Inc. and GoDaddy Inc. charge $12.88 and $14.99, respectively, for a .com name, with occasional discounts for new registration.
In addition to an attractive registration charge, Cloudflare Registrar is also offering free security features, including two-factor authentication, multiuser support and what it describes is “a security-focused customer support team gives you peace of mind that your domain is safe.”
A higher tier, called Custom Domain Protection, is available to Cloudflare Enterprise customers. It adds additional protection from domain hijacking with “high-touch, on and offline verification of any changes to your Registrar account.” Domains registered and hosted by Cloudflare also come with Whoisguard protection as standard.
“’I love my domain registrar.’ Has anyone ever said this? From before Cloudflare even launched in September 2010, our early beta customers were literally begging us: ‘Will you please launch a registrar too?!,” Cloudflare Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince said in a blog post. “Today we’re doing just that, launching the first registrar we hope you’ll be able to say you love. It’s built around three principles: trust, security, and always-fair pricing. And it’s available to all Cloudflare customers.”
The service is currently only open in closed beta with existing Cloudflare customers getting priority to join. The service, for now, does not support new domain registrations versus domains transferred from other registrars.
“We promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges,” Prince added. “That’s true the first year and it’s true every subsequent year. If you register your domain with Cloudflare Registrar you’ll always pay the wholesale price with no markup.”
Image: Cloudflare
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