A great example for why you shouldn't transfer your domain to Cloudflare Registrar if you're also using their CDN. Those who have transferred their domains cannot change DNS servers to mitigate the outage.
One thing is not every free or pro plan on cloudflare is personal use.
I'm running the web servers, official wiki, and game external resource portal for the most active open source video game on github, through cloudflare, and maybe we might not want our 60 million requests a month website to go down when cloudflare does.
Because I can tell you right now our 300 a month budget (that mind you, is capable of covering 7 game servers that can handle 100 connected players (each)) can't take the 80 dollar hit just to make cloudflare not a single point of failure.
If you don’t count this as a personal or hobby project it’s a community project. They don’t have a pricing plan for that so you either have to go pro or go to some other provider who gives you this much for free. Why should a company give you even more pro features for free if you are already getting a lot of things for free?
Ah, used to be an Enterprise only feature. We have access to that, but didn't realise it's now available to Business. Perhaps time for them to consider offering it more widely!
Changing your NS records at the registry could help, but keep in mind most TLDs are serving NS records with 1-2 day TTLs, so you'll still see a lot of traffic going to the old server.
If this is something you want to be able to mitigate, you really need to be running a seperate DNS infra from your hosting/CDN and use short TTL cnames to delegate hostnames to the CDN. This becomes a big challenge if you host on an apex domain (eg example.org instead of www.example.org), so don't do that.
Problem is not just about using Cloudflare as your DNS registrar really. Even if you have a different registrar, the Cloudflare model is to have the NS (nameserver) records set up to point to Cloudflare, and then they in turn resolve the DNS. You cannot really use Cloudflare without that set up. Changes to nameservers at a registrar level are rarely quick, at least quick enough to mitigate a disaster like this. It's why we've used two completely different domains at Ably (ably.io and ably-realtime.com) for all services we provide.
We wrote about a strategy to circumvent this sort of thing a little while back https://www.ably.io/blog/routing-around-single-point-of-fail.... Given two incidents in a matter of weeks, I think a revisit of that article in light of most businesses who operate on a single domain would be useful :)
