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#+date: <2022-06-01 Wed 00:00:00>
#+title: Moving Away from Cloudflare: Why I Chose Njalla for Secure DNS Management
#+description: Learn why I switched from Cloudflare to Njalla for DNS management and domain registration, focusing on privacy, control, and ease of use.
#+slug: ditching-cloudflare
* Registrar
After spending a year or so using Cloudflare for DNS only - no proxying
or applications - I spent the last few months using Cloudflare Tunnels
and Cloudflare Access to protect my self-hosted websites and
applications via their proxy traffic model.
However, I have never liked using Cloudflare due to their increasingly
large share of control over web traffic, as well as their business model
of being a MITM for all of your traffic.
So, as of today, I have switched over to [[https://njal.la][Njalla]] as
my registrar and DNS manager. I was able to easily transfer my domains
over rapidly, with only one domain taking more than 15-30 minutes to
propagate.
+I do still have two domains sitting at Cloudflare for the moment while
I decide if they're worth the higher rates (one domain is 30€ and the
other is 45€).+
#+begin_quote
*Update (2022.06.03)*: I ended up transferring my final two domains over
to Njalla, clearing my Cloudflare account of personal data, and deleting
the Cloudflare account entirely. /I actually feel relieved to have moved
on to a provider I trust./
#+end_quote
* DNS
As noted above, I'm using Njalla exclusively for DNS configurations on
my domains.
However, the transfer process was not ideal. As soon as the domains
transferred over, I switched the nameservers from Cloudflare to Njalla
and lost most of the associated DNS records. So, the majority of the
time spent during the migration was simply re-typing all the DNS records
back in one-by-one.
This would be much simpler if I were able to edit the plain-text format
of the DNS configuration. I was able to do that at a past registrar
(perhaps it was [[https://gandi.net/][Gandi.net]]?) and it made life a
lot easier.
** Dynamic DNS Updates
I have built an easy Python script to run (or set-up in =cron= to run
automatically) that will check my server's IPv4 and IPv6, compare it to
Njalla, and update the DNS records if they don't match. You can see the
full script and process in my other post: [[../njalla-dns-api/][Updating
Dynamic DNS with Njalla API]].
I haven't used this other method, but I do know that you can create
=Dynamic= DNS records with Njalla that
[[https://njal.la/docs/ddns/][work for updating dynamic subdomains]].
** Njalla's DNS Tool
One neat upside to Njalla is that they have a
[[https://check.njal.la/dns/][DNS lookup tool]] that provides a lot of
great information for those of you (AKA: me) who hate using the =dig=
command.
This was very useful for monitoring a couple of my transferred domains
to see when the changes in nameservers, records, and DNSSEC went into
effect.
* Tunnel
Cloudflare Tunnel is a service that acts as a reverse-proxy (hosted on
Cloudflare's servers) and allowed me to mask the private IP address of
the server hosting my various websites and apps.
However, as I was moving away from Cloudflare, I was not able to find a
suitable replacement that was both inexpensive and simple. So, I simply
went back to hosting [[https://cleberg.net/blog/set-up-nginx-reverse-proxy/][my own
reverse proxy with Nginx]]. With the recent additions of Unifi hardware
in my server/network rack, I am much more protected against spam and
malicious attacks at the network edge than I was before I switched to
Cloudflare.
* Access
Cloudflare Access, another app I used in combination with Cloudflare
Tunnel, provided an authentication screen that required you to enter
valid credentials before Cloudflare would forward you to the actual
website or app (if the website/app has their own authentication, you'd
then have to authenticate a second time).
I did not replace this service with anything since I only host a handful
of non-sensitive apps that don't require duplicate authentication.
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