I was thinking Cloudflare as a registrar and AWS as name servers, but good choice regardless.
Comment on Owners of a domain, which domain registrar did you choose and why?
ikidd@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Namecheap for registrar and Cloudflare for the name servers. Always keep those services separated so if one dies, you can still get into the other service to fix it.
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Moonrise2473@feddit.it 8 months ago
Is it possible to do that? Afaik they don’t allow to use different name servers if they’re registrars
I had the domain on a registrar that didn’t allow changing name servers (Tophost for 6 euro per year) and I had to “hop” with ovh for 60 days before having cloudflare for a registrar as they didn’t allow to transfer the domain with different NS
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Cloudflare doesn’t allow me to change my name servers? What blasphemy! I had never considered this, I thought it would be allowed by default. Where can I read about this?
I’m looking for a cheap domain registrar with terraform support
dan@upvote.au 8 months ago
It’s the main reason why their domains are so cheap. Their thinking is that since you have to use Cloudflare services to use the domain, you may look at the paid services and decide to pay for one, or suggest it at your workplace.
They charge wholesale price for domains, so they make $0 profit on them. Effectively it’s a loss leader to hook you into the ecosystem. That’s the same reason why VMware ESXi used to be free for home labs - users would become advocates for it and use it professionally.
blurg@lemmy.world 8 months ago
If a registrar goes out of business, ICANN transfers the domain(s) to another registrar.
If a name server business fails, you change name servers through your registrar.
You can’t really fix registrar services in your name server, nor name server problems through your registrar. (Unless, of course, your registrar is also your name server.)
ikidd@lemmy.world 8 months ago
If your registrar goes down but the NS are on a different provider, the root servers will keep that NS record and all will be well. You can go to a different registrar and transfer it over, but in the meantime it’ll be fine and you can do whatever you need with your DNS.
If the DNS provider goes down, you can go to your registrar and quickly change the NS to another provider. It’ll quickly be back up on your new DNS servers.
Believe me, I’ve done this for 3 decades because one or the other have gone down on me more than once and I’ve had minimal downtime with this separation. Even when I was running my own NS, I kept more than one NS outside my server farm so if my connections went down, I could pop the farm up on a backup colo and point my tertiary accordingly.
blurg@lemmy.world 8 months ago
After a bit of research, I’m forced by facts (NS records can be cached for an undetermined time) to see what you’re saying. Thank you for teaching me.
The workings are, of course, a bit more complicated than what either of us have said (here’s a taste), but there is a situation as you describe, where separating the registrar from the name servers, and the name servers from the domain, could save the domain from going down.
ikidd@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Well, I kinda simplified it, but yes, the root servers will keep the NS records as long as nothing else updates it (or nobody requests it for longer than the TTL that came with the last lookup) which is why it works.
Happy to help.