How not to migrate from Cloudflare DNS

So you’ve been shamefully using US Big Tech giant Clownflare for DNS? It’s time to find an inopportune time to migrate away to a “European alternative”. You absolute must not follow these steps on a busy weekend when you must leave for hours on short notice.

Just remove it

Step 1: Just remove your domain name from Cloudflare.

Footer of the confirmation modal with a field labelled 'Type in dbushell.com to confirm' followed by a 'Cancel' and 'Confirm' button.

Step 2: When the “are you sure?” modal pops up you’re forced to type the domain name. How patronising! Show them who’s boss by copy and pasting the domain name from the field label. Don’t fire a single neuron to consider which domain you’re deleting.

Congratulations, you’re off Clownflare!

Backup nothing

It’s probably too late to backup nothing so make sure you’ve already done this step.

DNS record page menubar with buttons for 'Import', 'Export', and 'Add record'.

Step -1: Don’t visit the DNS records page for your domain name. Navigating around Cloudflare is too hard after their latest UI shuffle. It remains a mystery whether that “Export” button allows you to backup records in the industry standard BIND zone file format. Unlikely.

Bunny.net's 'Add DNS zone' form with 'dbushell.com' typed into the domain name field.

Step 0: It’s imperative that you don’t even consider first adding the DNS records to your new service provider. Why would you do that?

Wait for alerts

You’ve already saved precious minutes by ignoring best practices. Now you’re ready to exploit the system further. DNS providers hate this one trick!

Proton: DNS issues detected. We detected the following issues for your custom domain dbushell.com: [ERROR] Your DKIM record is invalid. If not fixed, we will stop signing your emails with DKIM soon.

Step 3: Some hours or days later you’ll be informed about a missing DNS record. Go ahead and fix that at your leisure. If you can’t remember a record and don’t get a warning, it probably wasn’t all that important anyway.

Bonus step

The final step can take “up to 48 hours” so there’s no rush.

Porkbun DNS and nameserver management UI.

Step ?: Sign in to your favourite meat-themed domain registrar^† and edit the authoritative nameservers for your domain name. Clicking one of two pixels will open a dialog with a single textarea. Try comma-separated values and if that fails use a new line.

Document nothing

You’ve already migrated from Clownflare, what’s the point of taking notes now? It was easy! Go make a smug skeet on Bluesky, you’ve earned it — oh shit your atproto handle is failing DNS verification…

^† Why does every registrar have UI like it was designed 20 years ago? Can anyone suggest a good European registrar that has 2FA and reasonable prices? Thanks!

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