Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest content delivery networks (CDN), has become a fully-fledged domain name registrar. It already had some of the registrar functions: registrants were able to transfer their domain names registered by other registrars under Cloudflare’s management. However, the registration of new domain names was not available. Now, the company is offering an entire range of domain name registrar services.
It is noteworthy that Cloudflare’s registration pricing is “at-cost.” The registrant pays the registry a wholesale price plus any applicable ICANN transaction fees. For instance, the registration of a new domain name in .COM will cost $8.57.
Domain Incite notes that this business model is not unique and is used by several more registrar companies with Cloudflare being the largest and most famous one. The company currently works with over 250 TLDs, and plans on launching 40 more in the nearest future. As of late May, Cloudflare was managing some 325,000 domain names.
It is obvious that selling domain names at the same price it receives them from the registries, Cloudflare does not have any income and even loses money given costs associated to running this business. However, it has many other sources of income, from the content delivery network to the DDoS-attack protection service. Only Cloudflare clients can apply for the company’s registration services, but it has free plans among its offerings.
