One of the biggest announcements at Cloudflare Birthday Week (they turned 8) was the announcement of an at cost Domain Registrar. The offer of at cost domain names from a reputable provider will be welcomed by a large number of small businesses.

We are frequently contacted by customers who are experiencing issues with their domain registrars including significant price rises after a low cost initial offer.

As part of Cloudflare's announcement they made the following promises.

Here's the promise of the Cloudflare Registrar: we'll follow the best possible security practices and offer you the best possible price. What do we mean by that? From the security side, we promise we'll allow you to enable two-factor authentication, we’ll lock your domain registration by default, and automatically enable best-practice security services like DNSSEC.

From the price side it’s even simpler: we promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges. That’s true the first year and it’s true every subsequent year. If you register your domain with Cloudflare Registrar you’ll always pay the wholesale price with no markup.

Cloudflare already offers free the following services on their free plan.

• Unmetered Mitigation of Distributed Denial of Service attacks
• Global Content Delivery Network
• Shared SSL security certificate

From their blog:

For instance, Verisign, which administers the .com TLD, currently charges $7.85 per year to register a .com domain. ICANN imposes a $0.18 per year fee on top of that for every domain registered. Today, if you transfer your .com domain to Cloudflare, that's what we'll charge you per year: $8.03/year. No markup. All we're doing is pinging an API, there's no incremental cost to us, so why should you have to pay more than wholesale?

How do I sign up and when can I use it?

When it launches your domains must be on Cloudflare already to take advantage of the service but eventually they will open up the service to new domains. You can register for early access today but will have to wait depending on how long you have had domains hosted with Cloudflare.

In order to get a little earlier access you can donate to Girls Who Code once you have registered for early access.

Source: Cloudflare Blog