Can anyone explain in non-technical terms what needs to be done to move a domain registration to Cloudflare, when Cloudflare is already enabled on said domain? I have a ton of domains at GoDaddy that I want to move (I moved all of my hosting to DreamHost several years ago). I’d like to move the registrations to Cloudflare because they charge HALF what GoDaddy or DreamHost charges.
It’s actually easy, I have been moving some of my client Domain Registrations there. You are linking to the wrong article, this is an easier resource here
Whenever you move a registration anywhere (including Cloudflare) you just start the process at the new Registrar
Then you “unlock” the registration at the current Registrar
You will need to generate “Transfer (or Authorization) Code” Commonly called the EPP code as well
enter that at the new Registrar, and you are done!
The transfer won’t be instantaneous, but you won’t see any problems, as your hosting isn’t changing, and in Cloudflare’s case, you are serving cached versions of the website anyways, so it goes pretty smoothly!
Simples. i did one from Godaddy. The only caveat is it can’t be a new domain, it has to be 60+ days old. Takes a couple of minutes going through their step by step and a day or two to wait for the switch.
i did a few all at once a while back thinking it would save me time doing each step of the process on all of them at once.
but things got confused. the confirmation emails, EPP codes, and such didn’t arrive in order. or maybe weren’t labeled simply enough for me to understand which was which.
after a few failed attempts at some part of the process it locked me out of a couple domains and neither registrar would host the domain or budge from the bad state for several hours.
when the lockout timer expired it was easy enough to just restart. lesson learned. and now lesson shared. :-)
All good points here. One thing to add - once the switch happens you don’t need to do anything in CF, they organise all the settings so its a real breeze.
I did this with various domains and it was very easy. Cloudflare also makes it very simple to manage. The only downsides are that you can only transfer existing sites and only retain Cloudflare as the registrar while the domains are active on Cloudflare.
I decided I wanted to remove a few domains away from Cloudflare, which necessitated moving to a new registrar as part of the process. If you decide to move away at some stage you will also need to look carefully at any settings you have enabled like DNSSEC or HSTS for example.