My new Domain

Guess what guys? #

I have just gotten a new domain!!

Woohoo!! Its time to celebrate.

Why did I decide to get this domain? #

My free jh123x.tk domain is expiring and host provider required me to pay $9.5 per year if I want to continue using it. Since I needed to pay for it anyways, why not just go out there and hunt for another domain and it might even be cheaper xD.

Being me, I literally went to google registering a domain. The first few results were google, godaddy and wix. Hmm, what is the point of the domain if I need to use cloudflare to manage by DNS anyways?? This prompted me to find if cloudflare is able to provide a domain service. This lead me to find out about cloudflare domain registration and I decided to go with it.

It mainly boiled down to 2 reasons

1. It was cheaper than the jh123x.tk domain
2. It concentrates all my management in 1 place. (Since I was using cloudflare for managing my DNS anyways)

What is the first thing to do after buying something new? #

Its time to play with it and see if there are any cool features to be discovered. Of course I decided to click on the various options which are presented in cloud flare. In the next few sections I will be elaboration on the features that I have came across.

List of Features #

1. DNSSec
2. Email routing
3. Analytics
4. Caching
5. Proxy

DNSSec #

What is DNSSec? #

The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is a feature of the Domain Name System (DNS) that authenticates responses to domain name lookups. It does not provide privacy protections for those lookups, but prevents attackers from manipulating or poisoning the responses to DNS requests. (Adapted from google)

What does it mean for me? #

It prevents other name servers from sending a fake IP address to redirect to clients to tell them that my website is from another ip address. This is a very useful security feature to have. To read up more about it visit the link here

TLDR: Its just an additional security feature…..

Email routing #

Cloudflare creates this beta feature that allows email addresses that are mapped to my domain to be forwarded to another email address of my choice. This means that I can redirect any email sent to jh123x@jh123x.com to my personal email and create many different email addresses to register for various different accounts. Hue hue hue……

I’m just saying that it is a possibility. I’m definitely not going to do that. Its too troublesome. It is still quite cool to have such a feature available in case there is anything I need to do with it in the future.

Analytics #

Cloudflare also provides analytics on the domain.

As of writing this, this is the status of the website as shown on cloudflare.

This feature is very handy for keeping track of the users of the website and lets me find out more about you guys! Do not worry though, there is no user specific information available on the platform, only aggregated data.

Caching #

Cloudflare also provide caching.

What does that mean? #

Cloudflare keeps a copy of the website so as to serve it to the user faster rather than making a request to my server every time someone wants to fetch some information. As a result of that, the load times of the website will be faster than ever before :D.

Proxy #

Cloudflare provides proxy service as well.

Basically, the ip address of the website points to somewhere on cloudflare while my real ip address is hidden from view. When someone searches up information on the IP, they will also find information regarding cloudflare instead of my information.

Conclusion #

There are many other features of cloudflare that I want to play with….. But currently this are all the ones that I have managed to explore. Maybe in the future blog post, I will elaborate more on the other features that I have not discovered yet.

Technical Information (For nerds) #

1. Cost about $90 USD for 10 years
2. Provided by cloudflare

For more information about it visit their page on domain registration here