Finally, a decent DNS provider! You might not have noticed, but I switched starbeamrainbowlabs.com to Cloudflare DNS the other month. I meant to blog about it at the time, but forgot - so I'm doing it now :P

This comes in a succession of various DNS providers such as GoDaddy and Uniregistry who, while nice enough, didn't really provide what I'm after.

The transfer process itself was really rather simple - much moreso than the transfer I did from GoDaddy to Uniregistry.

GoDaddy is way too expensive after the first year, and doesn't allow you to create many different DNS record types - instead preferring to roll them into various 'premium' products which I have neither the money nor the inclination to purchase. After all, you're only paying for a string of characters to be globally unique, and hosting for a small text file containing your DNS records!

Uniregistry is better, but they still don't support record types such as CAA, which let you whitelist who's allowed to issue SSL certificates for your domain.

Cloudflare, however, support all the record types. Even ones I've never heard of. It's so cool! They provide the service at cost-price (which means it's much cheaper than either Uniregistry and certainly GoDaddy), and they provide privacy as standard - at no extra cost! No individual should have to pay to hide their full name and address (I'm looking at you, GoDaddy).

You do have to be careful to set it to avoid proxying requests through Cloudflare for each DNS record you add, but this isn't a huge deal. Cloudflare's main business is improving the performance of your website by optimising it and serving it through their global network, after all - so I don't think I can fault them for setting it as the default :P

It's also slightly awkward that you can't actually buy domains through Cloudflare. You have to buy them elsewhere and transfer them in, which is a huge pain. I guess that if they let you buy domains directly, the rest of the domain-name trading business would collapse? Thoughtful of them I suppose, but considering that you can pay literally thousands of pounds for some domain names it does begin to make me wonder......

Anyway, I haven't yet moved starbeamrainbowlabs.co.uk over because Cloudflare don't support .co.uk domains yet, but if I haven't by the time this blog post comes out I'll be setting the name servers to Cloudflare at least very soon (top tip! You can set the name servers for a domain that you own to another provider like Cloudflare, even if you've got your domain registered with another company like Uniregistry).

Found this interesting? Transferring your domain name over? Got another cool provider? Comment below!