Introducing Cloudflare Domain Protection — Making Domain Compromise a Thing of the Past

Everything on the web starts with a domain name. It is the foundation on which a company’s online presence is built. If that foundation is compromised, the damage can be immense.

As part of CIO Week, we looked at all the biggest risks that companies continue to face online, and how we could address them. The compromise of a domain name remains one of the greatest. There are many ways in which a domain may be hijacked or otherwise compromised, all the way up to the most serious: losing control of your domain name altogether.

You don’t want it to happen to you. Imagine not just losing your website, but all your company’s email, a myriad of systems tied to your corporate domain, and who knows what else. Having an attacker compromise your corporate domain is the stuff of nightmares for every CIO. And, if you’re a CIO and it’s not something you’re worrying about, know that we literally surveyed every other domain registrar and were so unsatisfied with their security practices we needed to launch our own.

But, now that we have, we want to make domain compromise something that should never, ever happen again. For that reason, we’re Continue reading

Registrar for Everyone

Today, we are excited to announce that all Cloudflare customers now have full Registrar access, including the ability to register new domains.

Second, starting today — and over the course of the next few weeks — we will be introducing over 40 new top-level domains (TLDs). We’re starting with .uk, our most requested country code extension. Initially, customers will only be able to transfer in existing .uk domains from other registrars, but support for new registrations will become available within the next few weeks. In keeping with our at-cost model, .uk domains will be priced at the wholesale registry fee.

A short registrar primer

In the domain name world, there are two key players: registrars and registries. Understandably, the two are often confused. One way to look at it is that registries are the wholesalers and registrars are the retailers. Registries host the centralized database of registered domains within a TLD. They are responsible for establishing the policies and business rules for the TLD. They also set the wholesale price. Registrars sell domains to end users and manage those registrations on an ongoing basis. They set the retail fee, collect payment, provide customer support, and ensure registrations are renewed Continue reading