DNS Hosting and Registrar

I think the first service I wanted to make use of from Cloudflare was their DNS hosting. This is because DNS is such a critical component and actually plays a large part in the performance of one’s online presence.

When I have purchased a domain in the past, I have left its hosting on the registrar in question. Most of the time this was a company based here in the UK, not giving it a second thought. In reality, I had made a critical mistake!

Let’s say I was hosting the API of my latest iOS app at api.myapp.com. Each time a client looked up this address, that could cause¹ a roundtrip to my registrar’s DNS server. Now let’s say my users are based on the west coast of America - that is a transatlantic round trip!

Cloudflare DNS

Cloudflare operates the fastest authoritative DNS servers on the Internet. If that was not enough they also help ISC operate the F-Root nameserver. Guess what? Also the fastest!

This is all achieved thanks to their Anycast network and hosting at their 155+ data centres located around the world. I would highly recommend reading the full details.

So now user can resolve api.myapp.com in sub-15ms vs 100ms plus! Not only that, but Cloudflare also protect your zone using their world-class DDoS protection! You may be wondering how much all this performance and security is all going to cost?

…it is completely free!! To get started, head to signing up where you will be guided through the whole process.

Registrar

As if that was not enough, Cloudflare recently announced their entry into the registrar business. What really stands out to me is their commitment to protecting their users and keep costs down. They are offering this service at wholesale prices. For me, this works out to be roughly half the cost per year than I was paying before. No-brainer!

I am lucky enough to have a place in the early access programme and have already moved this domain over to them. As an added bonus I now have DNSSEC enabled. This was not possible before, because my registrar did not support it.

Alas, not all my domains are supported. Eg, the .co.uk and .app TLDs. That being said I have complete faith that this will not take long.