Moving to Cloudflare from google domains

As my recent post said, I’ve setup a new a new blahniknet. Main reason for the move is that I have been using google domains to manage the domain and that was easy to setup to have it go to blogger so thats why the old site was there. I’ve used my domain mostly for email for the family, and haven’t really done any blogging or web hosting.

Google domain worked great, as it was easy to register a domain and just pay for that without having to also be hosting with them. Have it go to blogger was even better since it meant I didn’t have to host a website somewhere else. And while I could the domain for only email, I am not a fan when I get an email and go to the website and there is nothing there.

Unfortunately, google sold their domain management to square space. This wouldn’t have been a big problem, but one of the other features I use is Dynamic DNS (ddns), and that is something the square space doesn’t support. Without going into details, most domains like that you write in a web browser get an IP address from a DNS server to tell your browser where to go. This works great if you own the IP address and most hosting services will give you a static aka permanent address. But most internet providers do from time to time change your address, of it that happens the DNS IP address would be wrong and tell the browser to go to the wrong place.

Part of my usage for blahniknet.com is to have some subdomains that I use to connect to services on my server. When I host a game server for a few friends to play, instead of having to look up my current IP address they can use the text address I gave them and things get looked up and sent to the right address. I could manually log into the domain host and update it each time, but with google I was able to setup a ddns service that gave the update when my ISP changes my domain. This feature wasn’t something square space had, so I’d have to do something else.

Up comes cloudflare.com to save the day. They have a free tier for personal use that lets me use them as my DNS server. They also allow you to use them to manage your domains, which I also chose and transferred over to them and now pay through them which is actually very cheap (most of the cost is because of the domain, not their markup).

Switching to cloudflare was also super easy. Unlike many other services that make you go through and input your DNS settings, they pull what you have today and let you transfer that data if you want. On top of that they give me much more insight and also protection then I was getting which is awesome.

If you have been using google domains I do highly recommend you move to cloudflare unless you already use squarspace or need a website hosted by them.

The one thing cloudflare doesn’t do though is actually host my website. But what I used is a story for another day.