Most small businesses think about their domain name twice: when they buy it, and when the renewal bill arrives. In between, the domain and the website quietly do their jobs, until a renewal price jumps or the website slows to a crawl under a flood of junk traffic.
We have put our own domains and websites, and our clients’, behind the Cloudflare® network. This article explains what that is, why we chose it, and what it means for your costs and your risk.
What the Cloudflare network is, in plain English
The Cloudflare network is a global network of data centers that sits in front of your website and your domain. When someone visits your site, they connect to the Cloudflare network first. It answers for your domain, filters out traffic that looks hostile, serves copies of your pages from a location near the visitor, and passes the legitimate requests on to your actual website server.
It also runs your DNS. DNS is the Internet’s address book: it turns a name like yourcompany.com into the numeric address of the server that answers for it, and it tells the world where to deliver your email.
How it differs from a retail registrar and host
Many businesses buy their domain from a large retail registrar and web host such as GoDaddy. That works, and it bundles a lot in one place: domains, hosting, email, website builders and add-ons. But if all you need from a provider is domain registration and DNS, you are paying retail prices for a commodity.
Cloudflare Registrar takes a different approach. According to Cloudflare, it “does not mark up domain prices at all”: you pay the price the registry charges plus the ICANN fee, and nothing more. (A registry runs a whole extension; Verisign runs .com. ICANN coordinates domain names worldwide and charges a small fee per domain.) The same at-cost price applies at renewal, so there is no low first year followed by a higher bill.
One condition matters: domains registered with Cloudflare Registrar must use Cloudflare DNS. Cloudflare states that “all domains on Cloudflare Registrar use Cloudflare nameservers.” For our clients that is no burden, because that is already where we manage DNS.
What it saves: the real numbers
Our owner, Scott, has been telling clients it is “nearly 50% cheaper.” We checked, and as of October 2026 the saving on a .com domain is actually a little better than that:
| .com domain, one year | Price |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare Registrar (registry fee $10.26 plus $0.20 ICANN fee, no markup) | $10.46 |
| GoDaddy published renewal price ($22.99 plus $0.20 ICANN fee) | $23.19 |
| Difference | $12.73 a year, about 55% less |
The GoDaddy figures come from its own guide to domain costs (dated June 2026), which also lists a first-year .com price of $0.01 with a three-year registration. Introductory prices are common across the industry; the renewal price is what you pay year after year.
Prices will move. Verisign has announced that its .com registry fee rises to $10.97 on November 1, 2026. Because Cloudflare passes that through at cost, its .com price should become about $11.17, which would still be roughly 52% below the GoDaddy renewal price above. For a business with a handful of domains, that is real money every year for exactly the same domain.
How it reduces risk to a small business website
Saving money got our attention. Protection is why we built our hosting around it.
DDoS attacks
Cloudflare describes a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as an attempt to disrupt a server, service or network “by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.” For a small business, that flood can swamp both the web server and the Internet connection in front of it.
Here is the part most people miss: once a large attack fills your connection, no firewall or server at your site can help, because the junk traffic has already used up the bandwidth before your equipment sees it. A large attack has to be absorbed upstream, by a network with far more capacity than the attacker can throw at it. That is what the Cloudflare network is built to do, and Cloudflare includes unmetered DDoS protection on every plan, including Free. It reduces the risk of being knocked offline; no service can promise that every attack is stopped.
The rest of the toolkit
- SSL: encrypted connections (the padlock in the browser) with certificates managed for you.
- CDN and caching: copies of your pages and images are served from locations near each visitor, so pages load faster and your server does less work.
- Bot protection: automated traffic that scrapes, spams or probes your site can be challenged or blocked.
- WAF rules: a web application firewall (WAF) checks requests for common attack patterns before they reach your site.
As of October 2026, the Cloudflare Free plan includes DNS, unmetered DDoS protection, CDN, SSL and a free managed firewall ruleset. Cloudflare Pro ($20 a month billed annually) adds image optimization, whole-page WordPress caching and more firewall features.
How FTI uses it
Cloudflare is one half of our secure web hosting. Every website we host sits behind two layers of protection, and each site runs in its own isolated environment with its own database:
- The Cloudflare network, on every plan: DDoS protection, content delivery and SSL. Cloudflare Pro is standard on our Fully Managed and Business Critical plans, adding faster WordPress pages, image optimization, more firewall rules and stronger bot blocking, and Business Critical can be upgraded to Cloudflare Business.
- A Sophos web application firewall, on every plan: a second layer that inspects every request. Its rules follow the OWASP Core Rule Set and block SQL injection, cross-site scripting, directory traversal, protocol abuse and vulnerability scanners before they reach the server, with protections customized for each client.
On top of that, every site is onboarded by our team, reviewed and cleaned before it moves, and looked after with AI-assisted management and monitoring. Plans start at $95 per website per month, and current FTI managed IT and IBeXc customers can add a Web Presence site for $35. The hosting plans page has the details.
We manage your DNS in our Cloudflare account, including the records your email depends on. You keep ownership of your domain, and we can give you your own Cloudflare login limited to just your domain.
If you have read why your website may be your weakest link, you know why we take this seriously. When we moved our own sites, we found problems on every one of them. Putting them behind the Cloudflare network was one of the first things we did.
If you are a managed IT client, ask us to review your domains and renewal dates. We will tell you what moving them would involve and what it would save. Not a client yet? Call us anyway at 907-257-2600 or get in touch, and we can talk through how our services can help your business.
