Cloudflare disabled DNS can't transfer out domain
Woke up this morning to an urgent call from a client that their website was down. Did the checks and discovered that there were zero DNS records. Wait, what?
The domain is paid for and active and, unfortunately, Cloudflare is the registrar.
After submitting a support ticket, we finally got an email from Cloudflare saying that we had violated terms of service, no details, however it promised that our existing services would remain in tact (ha).
I submitted a new support ticket to a different category asking what was up, and finally some bot responded to the ticket saying it was because of section 2.8, the following text:
"The interstitial page on your website was automatically triggered because you are serving video or a disproportionate amount of images without paying for such services, in violation of Section 2.8 of our Terms of Service."
I looked over everything and the website is hardly using data, but I disabled Cloudflare entirely.
The DNS is entirely down, and most alarming, we can't transfer out the domain, that page gives a 403.
I'd already removed everything that was mine from Cloudflare over poor registrar support in the past, but it seems like they're going the way of Google and being a terrible company.
See this post from two years ago about preventing transfering out domains.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31576353
Transfer domains ASAP, there are 2800+ icaan registrars, I use gkg.net. Fill the complain to icaan about cloudflare. A civil case is also possible.
And host your DNS using multiple cheap vms using multiple companies + power DNS.
If you don't want to manage this yourself, use at least two companies DNS auth services and edit their apex NS list accordingly, ignore SOA being different, and make sure you changes are applied to both DNS providers.
And keep your (A)dress/(AAAA)ddress records TTL low, max 3 hours so you can act quickly.
I've used cloudns.net and digital ocean both for one domain, both allows to edit NS in apex.