Moving Away From Cloudflare

A few weeks ago, after going to FOSDEM, I finally decided to move away from Cloudflare. That’s something that has been on my mind for quite a while, but I guess the law of inertia was keeping me from doing it. Today I want to show how simple it can be. First things first: what did I use Cloudflare for? Not for much, actually. I had one domain registered there - not by choice -, and used it only as DNS for all other domains I have. For registering other domains, I've been using PorkBun for quite some time, so that's where I moved the only domain to. For the DNS registry, I decided on Bunny. I have been using Bunny CDN for the media on this website for quite a while, and I knew they had a DNS service, but hadn't looked at it yet. After looking at the docs, and the interface, all looked good. They’re also European, which is also a nice added bonus in times like this. But before all of that, I had to move the only domain registered at Cloudflare to PorkBun. That process took quite a few days, but did not take that much effort. I've always found the process of transferring domains between registrars quite... interesting. I can't put my finger on it. For managing the DNS of my domains, I’ve been using DNSControl for quite some time. It allows me to have all the DNS configurations in a single file, and with a command, everything gets updated in all domain registrars and also in the different nameservers. A neat feature of DNSControl is that it allows “pushing” DNS records to multiple nameservers for the same domain, creating a shadow nameserver. I started by doing this for all domains, to get a copy of all the records at Bunny: var REGPORKBUN = NewRegistrar("porkbun") var CLOUDFLARE = NewDnsProvider('cloudflare') var BUNNYDNS = NewDnsProvider("bunnydns") D('example.com', REGPORKBUN, DnsProvider(CLOUDFLARE), DnsProvider(BUNNYDNS, 0), A('@', '127.0.0.1', CFPROXYON), A('www', '127.0.0.1', CFPROXY_ON), // ... ) A few days after, I just swapped the order of the nameservers and put Bunny first for a few domains and Cloudflare second. That meant the nameservers in the registrar for those domains would get updated to Bunny and I would indeed be using bunny. It went well, until I started getting some SSL errors. I had forgotten to update Caddy’s automatic SSL configuration to know I use Bunny instead of Cloudflare. After updating that, it all went well. In the meanwhile, I’ve updated a few other domains without issues. In the meanwhile, all the domains have been updated. A nice bonus with al of this is Bunny's interface: it is incredibly simple and easy to navigate. Cloudflare's interface is an authentic maze and I will never understand how that happened. In the meanwhile, Cloudflare has started automatically deleting my old domains from their dashboard. I actually didn't know that was a thing, but I guess I'm fine with it. Maybe the next step is to try an European alternative to Let's Encrypt, which I recently learned exists!