Spaceship is the registrar; Cloudflare hosts DNS + email routing

Domains at Spaceship. NS to Cloudflare. Email Routing to Gmail

Spaceship is the registrar; Cloudflare hosts DNS + email routing

Decision

Three roles, three places, one inbox:

• Registrar = Spaceship. The user’s existing registrar holds oriz.in, oriz.me, and any future family domains. WHOIS privacy is on, auto-renew enabled.
• DNS host = Cloudflare DNS. Spaceship NS records point at Cloudflare’s nameservers. All A / AAAA / CNAME / MX / TXT records are managed at Cloudflare.
• Inbound email = Cloudflare Email Routing ? forwards *@oriz.in, *@oriz.me, and every per-extension / per-site subdomain into one Gmail inbox. The family does not host mailboxes.

This supersedes the earlier “use Cloudflare Registrar everywhere” direction — Cloudflare Registrar stays documented as a swap target in services/infra/domain/cloudflare-registrar.md but is not the active pick.

Why

• The user already runs Spaceship as their existing registrar across personal domains. Consolidating the new oriz* domains there keeps renewal management in one place — fewer dashboards, fewer payment methods to track, one set of renewal alerts in Gmail.
• DNS at Cloudflare is non-negotiable: it integrates Pages / Workers / R2 / DNS / Email Routing in one dashboard, and is free at any scale the family hits. Spaceship’s bundled DNS is fine but doesn’t have the integration surface.
• Cloudflare Email Routing is free up to 200 routing addresses per zone with unlimited forwarding volume — far more than the family will ever need. Pairs with Resend for outbound, so receive ? send both stay free.
• One Gmail inbox is the simplest possible mail surface — all routing rules live at Cloudflare; per-purpose labels live at Gmail; no additional inbox to monitor.
• Domain renewal at Spaceship is the same narrow card-on-file exception the family already accepts for any registrar (see no-card-on-file.md) — it’s not a new exception.

Implications

DNS / domain plumbing

• At Spaceship: NS records for each zone set to the pair Cloudflare assigns (xxx.ns.cloudflare.com). Verify with dig NS oriz.in.
• Cloudflare DNS holds all other records:
  • Apex oriz.in ? Cloudflare Pages project for the home site
  • *.oriz.in subdomains ? individual Cloudflare Pages projects (per subdomains-under-oriz-in.md, cloudflare-pages-for-all-sites.md)
  • auth.oriz.in ? Firebase Auth’s hosted handler
  • api.oriz.in ? Hono Worker
  • s.oriz.in ? short-link Worker
  • status.oriz.in ? Better Stack status page
  • status-backup.oriz.in ? Instatus mirror
  • MX ? Cloudflare Email Routing’s three MX hosts

Email plumbing

• Cloudflare Email Routing: catch-all *@oriz.in ? <user>@gmail.com, plus curated rules for support@, security@, dmarc@, noreply@ (drop).
• SPF: v=spf1 include:_spf.mx.cloudflare.net include:<resend-spf-host> -all — verify the merged SPF stays inside the 10-lookup limit.
• DMARC: v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:[email protected]; (forwards to Gmail).
• DKIM: Resend’s keys for outbound; Email Routing preserves original DKIM state on inbound forwards.
• Gmail filters apply per-purpose labels (oriz/support, oriz/security, …) so a single inbox stays navigable.

Operational

• Renewal notifications route to the same Gmail inbox via the catch-all ? starred + labelled by Gmail filters.
• Adding a new oriz* domain: register at Spaceship ? add zone at Cloudflare ? flip NS at Spaceship ? enable Email Routing at Cloudflare ? add catch-all rule. ~10 minutes.
• Migrating an existing domain TO Spaceship: 5-7 day registrar transfer. DNS stays put on Cloudflare throughout — zero resolution downtime.

What we don’t do

• No Spaceship DNS — even though it’s free, NS-delegating to Cloudflare gets us the integrated dashboard and free DDoS / Pages auto-wire.
• No Spaceship email forwarder — Cloudflare Email Routing is the only forwarder used.
• No mailbox hosting — the family neither runs Postfix nor pays for Google Workspace / Fastmail / Migadu. Inbound forwards to one Gmail; outbound goes through Resend.
• No Cloudflare Registrar for new domains — Spaceship is now the active registrar. Cloudflare Registrar stays documented as a swap target only.

Cross-refs

• Spaceship registrar service entry
• Cloudflare DNS service entry
• Cloudflare Email Routing service entry
• Cloudflare Registrar — documented swap target
• Cloudflare Pages for all sites
• Subdomains under oriz.in
• Resend — outbound transactional
• No card-on-file rule — domain-renewal exception

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