Added a site that already had an SSL then upon adding to Cloudflare the site went down

#1

Today I added a site that already had a valid SSL and for some reason, it took the site down, no big deal because I just adjusted the name servers back to original and it came back up, however, I do not understand why that would happen. I even went into the CloudFlare SSL settings and turned the SSL to off, was this wrong? I tried it with ‘full’ and ‘flexible’ settings but nothing solved it. I have done this in the past with a site from the exact same host and it worked perfect, I even duplicated the settings.

At first the error said: SSL ERROR NO CYPHER OVERLAP, then after messing with the settings I got the too many redirects error.

Any ideas? Thank you!

#2

It should be ON and use full SSL (you need SSL installed on your server). Here is community tip for the error:

#3

Ok thank you and I’m sorry if I was confusing, so above I mentioned that at first I did do it with full, then flexible, then I ended up turning it off, so yep I did try it with full…so kinda back to original question.

  • Also I did already find the tip you suggested before posting, but it didn’t seem to help me. Thank you for answering.
#4

If you know what is going on, you can better decide to how use Cloudflare (CF) services.
This is how your website is accessed without CF:
image

And using CF as a proxy it looks like:
image

Look at communication between CF and your server (purple rectangle):
image

Communication between CF and your server could be:

  1. Insecure: You don’t have SSL on your server => Flexible SSL
  2. Secure: You have self-signed SSL on your server. It is better than #1=> Full
  3. Secure: You have valid SSL on your server. Best => Full Strict

Before proxying (using :orange:) your traffic via CF check your website to have a green pad lock (when CF is :grey:), if you have it you can use Full Strict mode.

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