"I'm moving the domain to Cloudflare." I hear that sentence often, and it almost always hides two different operations rolled into one. Separating them is the whole game: one is about who owns and renews the name, the other is about who answers DNS queries. They change independently, and for an Italian domain the difference is not academic.
A registrar and a nameserver are not the same thing
The registrar is the company through which the domain is registered with the registry. It is the one that invoices you for the renewal and appears in the domain's records. Changing it moves the contract from one supplier to another.
The nameservers are the servers that answer the question "where does this site live?". They are a setting on the domain, not the domain itself. You can keep the name where it is registered and hand the answering to anyone.
Almost everything people want from Cloudflare — speed, protection, a DNS panel that does not fight back — depends on nameservers. The registrar has nothing to do with it.
Cloudflare Registrar does not accept .it
This is where it gets practical. Cloudflare Registrar supports more than four hundred extensions, but .it is not among them, and the request to support it has been open for years without an answer. The same is true of several other European country extensions.
So: if you have an .it, the domain stays registered where it is today — Aruba, Register, Netsons, whoever your current supplier is. That is not a technical limitation of your domain, it is a commercial decision by Cloudflare.
On a .com, .net or .eu the registrar transfer is possible, and it is one of the few honest offers in the industry: Cloudflare resells domains at the registry's cost price, with no markup.
What you can do anyway
Delegate the DNS. That single move brings home ninety per cent of the value:
- fast DNS answers worldwide, without paying for a separate DNS service;
- managed HTTPS, with no certificates to renew by hand;
- page and asset caching, which takes work off the server;
- WAF, rate limiting and protection from automated traffic;
- a panel where adding a record takes a minute rather than a support ticket.
The domain keeps renewing where it is registered. All that changes is who answers questions about it.
The part that breaks: email
The fastest way to turn an improvement into an outage is to move the nameservers and forget the mail. Two mistakes, both common:
The MX records are not copied over. Cloudflare tries to import the existing zone, but the import is not a hundred per cent reliable: it reads what the current provider exposes, and some providers expose very little. If an MX is missing, mail stops arriving within minutes, and nobody notices until a customer phones.
The proxy is switched on for a record that must stay direct. In Cloudflare every record has a cloud icon: orange means "route through us", grey means "just answer". Mail, authentication records and subdomains used by external services must stay grey. With an orange cloud on a mail record, the world sees Cloudflare's IP address instead of your server, and delivery stops.
Before touching the nameservers, export the current zone and compare it line by line with the imported one. It is dull, it takes ten minutes, and it prevents the one mistake customers actually notice.
The right order of operations
- Export the current zone from the provider's panel, or query it record by record if the panel will not export.
- Lower the TTLs to five minutes at least a day ahead. This is what makes the switch reversible: if something goes wrong, the rollback propagates in minutes instead of hours.
- Rebuild the zone on Cloudflare and compare it against the export. Pay particular attention to MX, verification TXT records, SPF, DKIM keys, and subdomains pointing at external services.
- Set to grey everything that is not web traffic.
- Change the nameservers at the registrar, outside working hours.
- Verify immediately: site, HTTPS, sending and receiving a real email, contact forms, and any integration using a subdomain.
- Raise the TTLs again after a few quiet days.
What Cloudflare does not do for you
It does not renew the domain: the expiry stays the registrar's business, and yours. It does not fix ownership: if the name is registered to the agency that built your site, moving the DNS changes nothing about who holds it. And it does not sort out SPF, DKIM and DMARC: it hosts those records, it does not write them.
Those are three separate jobs, best done in order: first establish who owns the domain, then put it somewhere it can be managed, then deal with mail delivery.