GoDaddy really lived up to its bad reputation and recently changed their API rules. The rules are simple: either you own 10 (or 50) domains, you pay $20/month, or you don’t get the API. I personally didn’t get any communication, and this broke my DDNS setup. I am clearly not the only one judging from what I found online. A company this big gating an API behind such a steep price… So I will repeat what many people said before me (being right): don’t. use. GoDaddy.
Is it cheap? I got shifted to SquareSpace from Google Domains and it’s pricier. I switched the name cheap but have no loyalty to them.
You can just use the Cloudflare DNS Nameservers. No need to transfer the Domain.
This is what I do. Registered with Porkbun but have two domains pointing to Cloudflare NS’s for DNS. I then have a container locally that looks for IP changes on my home connection and if detected updates DNS to the new IP.
It’s reasonably priced. I was in the same boat with the Google domains shutdown. As long as you aren’t a heavy user, it has lots of cool features. But if you get their attention they’ve been known to fleece the crap out of small businesses that were using their free services. Most of my stuff is self hosted applications to move myself off of Google services, so my traffic is minimal.
I only have two domain names and both just redirect to my public code repositories.
I moved about half my domains (I have about roughly 30) to Cloudflare and then stopped as I started hitting caveats. For instance they considered some of my domains “premium” and wouldn’t take them. I was having problems using them with some hosted website providers, etc
I let the rest of my domains transfer to SquareSpace and it’s been mostly painless (besides Google Domains completely fucking up my email but that’s wasn’t SquareSpaces fault). I’ll probably run out the registration on all of them and make a decision on where I’m moving my domains next year. Probably won’t be Cloudflare though.
That said, Cloudflare definitely seems cheaper than SquareSpace.
Cloudflare apparently makes no or little to not profit on their domain registration business.
The prices supposedly only covers the fees related to domains that everyone has to pay.