What is the Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is an American web infrastructure and website security company that provides a content delivery network (CDN) and DDoS mitigation services.

Steps 01. Creating Cloudflare Account

if you don’t have Cloudflare Account, you can visit URL https://dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up and fille the information’s.  if not, you can send us the email  [email protected]

Steps 02: Adding Domain Name

Once Created the account you can add the domain to Cloudflare. 

  • Click on Add site from the top navigation bar.
  • Enter your website’s root domain and then click Add Site. For example, if your website is www.example.com, type example.com.
  • Cloudflare attempts to automatically identify your DNS records. This process takes approximately 60 seconds to complete.
  • 5. Click Next.
  •  Select a plan level.
  • Click Confirm in the Confirm Plan window that appears.
  • Review whether all DNS records were identified in the DNS query results window.
    • Manually add missing DNS records
    • Decide which subdomains enable Cloudflare security and performance features or bypass Cloudflare.security and performance features or bypass Cloudflare
  • Click Continue.
  • Copy the 2 Cloudflare nameservers displayed and click Continue

Step 03. Changing your domain nameservers to Cloudflare

To change your domain nameservers, you will need to use information from Cloudflare to update admin settings at your current registrar.

1. Copy information from Cloudflare

Once you have added an application to Cloudflare, that application will receive two assigned nameservers. You will need this information for future steps.

To get this information:

1. In the Cloudflare dashboard, select your account and newly added domain.

2. Copy the information from Replace with Cloudflare’s nameservers.

2. Update the admin settings for your registrar

1. If you do not know the name of your registrar, go to ICANN WHOIS and enter your domain.

2. Log into the administrator account for your domain registrar.

3. Make sure your registrar has disabled DNSSEC for your domain. For more details, see Why do I have to disable DNSSEC.

4. Replace the current nameserver records in your registrar account with the information you copied from Cloudflare. For detailed instructions, select a link in the list below.

5. Wait 24 hours while your registrar updates your nameservers. You will receive an email when your site is active on Cloudflare.

6. Confirm your site activation by logging into the Cloudflare dashboard:

  • If you no longer see Complete your nameserver setup, you have successfully updated your nameservers and your domain is active at Cloudflare.
  • If Complete your nameserver setup still appears:
    • Ensure the Name Server output correctly spells the Cloudflare nameservers and confirm Cloudflare’s nameservers are the only nameservers listed.
    • If the Name Server output is correct, select Re-check now.

Certain European registrars have a different nameserver registration process. Contact Cloudflare support if you experience issues.


How to check if your domain nameservers are now pointing to Cloudflare

There are a couple of different methods on how to check whether the nameservers have been updated at your Registrar to point to the Cloudflare nameservers:

  • You can use the command line to confirm what are the nameservers assigned to your domain:
*Linux/Unix*
dig domain_name +trace @1.1.1.1 
dig domain_name +trace @8.8.8.8
 
*Windows*
nslookup domain_name 1.1.1.1
nslookup domain_name 8.8.8.8

If the nameservers returned here are not the ones provided and expected by Cloudflare, you’ll need to check with your Registrar.

Most DNS tools online use cached query results, therefore, it may take longer for them to show the updated nameservers.

If you run into issues, below are some things you will want to confirm before reaching out to Support for further assistance:

  • check that no DS record is present, if so remove them at your Registrar
  • check that onlythe Cloudflare nameservers are present, and if not remove the other ones in Registrar configuration
  • check that the Cloudflare nameservers are spelled correctly in your Registrar configuration

Once your domain is active on Cloudflare, review our best practices for active Cloudflare domains.


Confirm traffic is proxied to Cloudflare

Some online tools such as GTmetrix don’t recognize Cloudflare as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) because we don’t operate like a traditional CDN.  Instead, confirm your domain traffic actively proxies through Cloudflare by browsing to https://www.example.com/cdn-cgi/trace. Replace www.example.com with the domain and hostname proxied to Cloudflare.  If proxied to Cloudflare, output similar to the following appears in the browser:

  fl=4f177
  h=www.example.com
  ip=2001:1900:2200:7525:749f:9ed1:444c:80b4
  ts=1562191016.292
  visit_scheme=https
  uag=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML,
  like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.157 Safari/537.36
  colo=SJC
  http=http/2
  loc=US
  tls=TLSv1.3
  sni=plaintext
  warp=off

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