Cloudflare is one of the largest cloud network you will find on the internet. Major service providers like Facebook, Netflix, Amazon… etc., use one or more services from Cloudflare. While Cloudflare is well known for its intelligent CDN (Content Delivery Network) and Security (such as DDOS, WAF… etc.), they also offer variety of other services. One of them being a domain registrar and DNS management where users can buy and manage.
Why choose Cloudflare?#
Cloudflare being an intelligent CDN network, hosting our domains with Cloudflare and making use of its DNS management helps resolve our website faster for end users. Not only that, Cloudflare provides its standard security features for free. Their free plan also offers managing the domain, proxy web requests, Universal SSL certificate, DDoS protection & many more.
How to add your domain to Cloudflare?#
Compared to other domain registrars, Cloudflare handles DNS queries a bit differently. That is Proxied DNS queries and DNS Only queries. For any DNS records such as A, AAAA and CNAME, proxy mode can be used. For all other DNS queries (such as MX, TXT, SPF, DKIM… etc.), always choose DNS only mode. Although its rare, there are occasion you might need to avoid enabling the Proxy for certain DNS requirement.
Here in this post, I’m doing a practical setup of a real domain onboarding from Name.com to Cloudflare. For any other providers, it will likely be similar journey. If you’re struggling with any of the providers, you can refer to Cloudflare’s Official documentation or Reach out to me, I’d be happy to offer my support.
Let’s go ahead with adding a domain to see its journey.
- Login to your Name.com account and click on the intended domain that you’re planning to manage. You’ll see Manage DNS Records. As a safety precaution, let’s take a backup of the DNS for recovery, therefore select EXPORT DNS RECORDS (CSV).
- Once done, go back to Cloudflare and login to your dashboard. Navigate to Domains —> Overview and select on Add Domain. On the next section select Connect a domain, key in your domain under Domain name field, keep all other value default, select Continue. You’ll then be prompted to select a plan, choose the Free plan to proceed.
- Upon selecting the plan, you’ll then be presented with the automatically imported DNS entries. Here you can see the Proxied and DNS Only option which I have explained earlier. Do review and add any DNS entries using Add record button given within the page, if the import has missed any, else proceed to click on Continue to activation button which is appearing at the end of the page. You’ll then be presented with required NS (name servers) of Cloudflare that you require to add to your registrar where your actual domain is.
- As you can see on the picture below, I have switched back to my domain registrar Name.com to add the given name servers. In order to do this follow step #1 and select Manage Nameserver this time instead of Manage DNS records. Delete any existing name server records ensuring no records exist. Then add the given name servers by Cloudflare and save changes.
Important
With the completion of step #4 above, your setup at existing registrar is completed. All you have to do moving forward is to keep renew the domain at your existing registrar website on time if you don’t intent to entirely transfer the domain to Cloudflare itself. YOU CAN REFER TO MY POST HERE IF YOU WISH TO TRANSFER TO CLOUDFLARE AND LET IT HANDLE BOTH DNS MANAGEMENT AND REGISTRATION.
- OnCe the Nameserver update at your existing registrat is done, switch back to your Cloudflare dashboard and click on “I updated my nameservers” Cloudflare will process the DNS update check. You may see Invalid nameservers if you switch to Domain overview and you can safely ignore as the change might take a bit of time depending on your registrar.
- In an event if the domain doesn’t update (very rarely), you can click on the domain name within the Cloudflare dashboard, and select Check nameservers now which might trigger the check again. Go back to the domain name overview in sometime where you’ll see the domain status as Active.
Congratulations! You have successfully connected your domain to Cloudflare. If you’re interested to make Cloudflare your domain registrar, please check out my next post on how to transfer your domain to Cloudflare. 🚀