When we register a domain using Cloudflare we cannot change the nameservers. As best as I can tell, that is an advantage, not a disadvantage. Is that correct? Do others here use Cloudflare for domain name registration? If I purchase a domain name I think is useful and I want to offer (donate, not sell) it to someone else for use, would Cloudflare domain registration be a problem? I have some domain names registered using Cloudflare (that I intend to keep) but it is not clear to me whether that could be a problem.
If your name servers can’t be changed, then you can’t host a web site with that domain that isn’t wherever the name servers are set to. In my book, that’s a bad thing, as you’d like to be able to select your hosting company differently from where the domains are registered. Many folks, including myself, wouldn’t use a registrar that didn’t let you set your own nameservers. But if you know today that you will always be happy with Cloudflare’s hosting, then I suppose you might not see it as a negative.
By the way, it just occurred to me to ask, if you can’t change the nameservers, do you even own the domain yourself if you register it at Cloudflare? Ie, can you move the domain registration to a different company if you want, or is it really Cloudflare’s domain and they have you “trapped” using their services?
I have a DigitalOcean VM. I have a domain name registered with Cloudflare. In the DNS for the domain name I have A records pointing to my VM and I have NS records specifying the DigitalOcean nameservers. The website is hosted in my VM. When I use whatsmydns.net to look up the NS records I get the Cloudflare nameservers. I did not understand that until now. I still do not fully understand, but as best as I can tell, we can use whatever host we want to use. If someone can explain what we would not be able to do then that will help but it is not as simple as being limited to just Cloudflare as the host.
I saw that before posting here. It does not help. For one, custom (or vanity) nameservers does not help. I am not clear about what that means; I am especially not clear about what is excluded. And I do not know what Cloudflare DNS without using Cloudflare branded nameservers means. And I do not know what zone-level, account-level and tenant-level custom nameservers are. And among everything that article says, it seems to say that everything is only available to Business and Enterprise plans.
In a nutshell it means you are free to use another DNS server when you register a domain with CloudFlare. You are not required to use their DNS servers.
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