zlacker

>>jgraha+(OP)
This is awesome! Charging the exact same price as the registry wholesale price.

NameSilo, as far as I know, comes very close to the registry pricing and offers DNSSEC, nameserver registration and other APIs with the registry.

This could totally throw all registrars out of competition for the price of registry wholesale price. You just have to hope CloudFlare wouldn't overstep their role as a registrar if you only register the domain from them.

>>Ayesh+g2
I currently use NameSilo. Don't forget they also offer free whois privacy for life.

My only complaint with them is their DNS records are only updated once every 15 minutes.

This makes doing automated API based DNS based LE challenges annoying because you need to sleep your script for 15 minutes to ensure the update got pushed.

Also, I'm surprised Cloudflare omit talking about whois privacy in the blog post. Makes me wonder if they plan to sell that for some amount of money.

>>nickjj+n9
We actually didn't talk about WHOIS Privacy because it's becoming less and less of a relevant feature in the post-GDPR world. We do support it, free of charge.

Cloudflare is also the largest authoritative DNS deployment in the world, and changes propagate in closer to 15 seconds than 15 minutes.

>>zackbl+mj
Thanks for the confirmation. Sounds promising.

Do you happen to also offer free email forwarding with registered domains?

>>nickjj+qk
I don't have the answer to that yet. On the one hand it's a bit far afield of what we normally do. On the other a lot of people seem to get it from their registrar and rely on it.

The ideal situation would be if we could find a way to do email forwarding which wasn't just as good as what they do, but was exciting and meaningful. We'll keep thinking about it and let you know on our blog.

>>zackbl+Vr
If you want to blow everyone away then I think you should start with giving free real inboxes for everyone (maybe with some sane limit, or a way to pay per month to increase it), and then introduce email forwarding in the future (because I'm sure some people will still want that feature even with real inboxes available).

If you GA'd with:

~$8 .com addresses, N real inboxes, free whois guard and a top notch DNS record API.

That's a compelling offer and I'd very likely switch from namesilo if that were the case.

To be honest, anything less and I'd stay with namesilo because the 15 minute timer can be worked around by using my web host's name servers (digitalocean pushes updates in a few seconds). I couldn't live without either email forwarding or a real inbox.

>>nickjj+1x
When you say real inboxes, are you thinking webmail of some sort? Don't most people prefer to use Google Apps or the like these days?

>>zackbl+Vz
Most places and projects I've worked in the past 10 years or so have used GSuite or similar for inboxes, and Amazon SES or similar for programatically sending email. Those that didn't (shared-hosted websites on CPanel installations seemingly do still exist in 2018) had access to webmail in the hosting panel or as an installable application.

>>JonKF+SG
Yeah right now I use email forwarding and SES to send emails (which required setting up an address that belongs to my domain, such as user@exampledomain.com).

In this case I forwarded that email to my gmail account and it all works, but it's not perfect.

In either case, having at least email forwarding or an inbox is essential for a lot of common things you'd want to do on a domain. Forwarding works ok to avoid $60 / year for Google's offerings but has some limitations.

This is coming at it from the POV of just setting up a VPS to host some sites and wanting to accept email from your domain name without paying any more than what the domain cost to register.

I think this use case is super common, especially on HN.

No one thought Let's Encrypt would step up and offer a top tier free SSL solution. If it can be done for SSL, it can be done for real inboxes. :)