Transfer DNS between accounts (not registrar)
Howdy!
We have a site we mange the DNS for on Cloudflare, but want to give the ownership to the site owners after managing it for a few years.
What is the best way to do this - can we add them as a Domain Administrator then remove ourselves?
30 Replies
if you mean transfer between CF account A & CF account B. Expect a 120 days wait my friend.
see https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/setup/manage-domains/move-domain/
It shocked me as well:NotLikeThis:
Cloudflare Docs
Move a domain between Cloudflare accounts Ā· Cloudflare Fundamentals...
You will have to move or transfer domains from one Cloudflare account to another if you:
You have a few options available:
Option 1 - Account ownership transfer
If it's just 1 account with their domain you can add them as a Super Administrator then remove yourself from the account.
This can be done at Manage Account > Members.
Option 2 - Scoped permissions
You could grant specific permissions to them to manage the domain in your Cloudflare account. This would be done by giving them scoped permissions to only their domains. There's no way to remove your access to the site this way - you would still have access to it, but the site owners could manage it themselves.
This again can be done at Manage Account > Members
Option 3 - New account
Lastly you could create them a new Cloudflare account and move the domain over to it. This process requires changing the nameservers and copying the domain's configuration over, as if you were setting up a new domain on Cloudflare.
In my experience I've not had to wait 120 days like the guy above mentioned if you give the old account super admin permissions to the new account while moving it over.
How is this seriously not an option. It's 2024 and there's no option to
UPDATE domains SET owner = x? Like what?Seriously? They went through the effort of making an entire fancy box, feature request, documentation, etc, but can't just like...give support a button and an input box to update it?
Sure it's simple from a technical perspective, but there's a lot of red tape involved.
When there's over 200 different TLDs, and each has their own rules and transfer procedures, it's not so simple. I'm sure they're working on it already
If they've taken this long they're definitely not. They just need to transfer it within their own structures (Cloudflare accounts), far as I'm aware that doesn't take any interaction with the various registries.
You're not actually transferring who owns the domain, none of the contacts or anything are changing
If I'm wrong I'm wrong, but that's my understanding of the situation
at the bare minimum you need to verify the new contact information is right/have them reenter it all
At the very least they should be able to let you just create a new registration with Cloudflare Registrar, that's what they make you do with another registrar
Yeah, but that's all internal to Cloudflare. My point is simply I don't think there's any interaction with the actual registry, just Cloudflare's internal structures.
then you have all the billing spaghetti which CF has issues with, and issues with the fact that CF's Registrar is tightly integrated with the zone and has specific integrations like dnssec and such
no CF has to provide accurate information to the registries
I believe that's true for all, and some like us even force it all to be public
Are they providing the account ID though?
If they're just providing the registrant information that's not changing, I don't think they need to do any interactions
Cloudflare already has documentation for transferring non-Cloudflare Registrar domains, the only thing holding them back seems to be having the registrar associate it with a different account
I mean I think it should def be here by now in a perfect world, but I wouldn't say it's anywhere near as simple as "just update the domain db", you have concerns over billing contacts/ownership, dealing with confirmation (some registrars like Porkbun you to verify your ID with them before transferring internally), then you have worries over the billing side of things, and the fact that registrar domains are tightly tied to zone and zone features
Oh I'm 100% oversimplifying yeah. But in the end as far as I can tell it just boils down to updating the various records/features to point to/use the new account.
I imagine it's somewhere between
- there's a ton of internal work needed for it (to go smoothly, that is)
- and it's relatively low prio
Probably yeah, what I just find absurd is that there's not even a way for support to do it
If it was something you'd need a paid plan and a support ticket to do I'd completely understand that, but the fact that it's just completely unavailable is insane to me
I think it's one of those things where it would just be messy with confirmation if support tried
:jebshrug:
All it takes is the same emails you already get from the Registrar, just click the link and confirm I would think
right but if support is handling it, how would they send out those emails, and ensure they do confirmation right, and somehow handle all the billing stuff as well?
sounds like a pain and at risk of humans messing stuff up
plus if it was paid plan only people would complain they're already paying for registrar, even though registrar is an at cost service
Click a button in the dashboard, stores a record in the DB, when it's confirmed it pops up as confirmed on the ticket or somewhere
Billing stuff yeah, that I don't know
I wouldn't be surprised if it's something possible but only Enterprise
I'd imagine you just make the new account have a payment method, then just create a new subscription and cancel the old one
I wouldn't be at all, everything fun and useful gets locked to Enterprise in my experience
Eventually it trickles down, sometimes
iirc there's some cool enterprise-only zone transfer stuff including config I heard about at one point
can't find it in search though
My solution is legit just gonna be wait until I can afford an Enterprise contract then force them to do it when I get onboarded š
Which will likely be never so yeah
I'm sure they'd find a way if it was super critical to a large enterprise customer
just hope one day they finish it so free customers can
š¤ or even Pro
in the meantime I just put anything I don't think I will keep in that Cf account forever in porkbun/external, the savings of CF's Registrar aren't too great compared to some registrars
And they 100% would for an enterprise customer
If you think you will keep it in that account forever (or are fine with just transferring it to external and leaving it there if you need to move it), then CF's Registrar can be nice and slower cost by some margin
It's too late for me now š
I just realized this guy's entire question was about transferring DNS and not Registrar lol, idk how it got hijacked to Registrar anyway lol
If anyone finds this in the future, the guide linked at the top is good: https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/setup/manage-domains/move-domain/
No need to wait any amount of time since not using Registrar.
Zones/Domains belong to the account, so you can't just add them as Domain Admin and remove yourself. If it's in your account you need to transfer it to theirs/have them make an account, and sadly that means losing config. Or you could have them make an account to start with/make an account for them and remove yourself after. (What https://discord.com/channels/595317990191398933/1228381907436306442/1231049577281486878 said basically)
Ha yeah thanks for the help on the dns!
I would also agree on the domain transfer rules. They are pretty bad and keep me from registering domains at Cloudflare, if godaddy can figure it out Iām pretty sure cf can