This is my first time setting up a personal website, so I think I am missing something basic in my configuration. hover.com is the registrar - so I updated the name servers for my domain to Cloudflare.
I added an A record in my Cloudflare domain to point to my bluehost IP.
Do I need to delete the existing A record on Cloudflare? My DNS doesn’t seem to be updating with my bluehost IP, so I am wondering if I am missing steps.
Any help, advice, or links for complete beginners would be much appreciated!
-Joe
Your DNS setup seems correct. Also your naked domain does point to Cloudflare, respectively is proxied. Only the www host still points to the - presumable - original host. You might want to either proxy that as well (switch to ) or turn it into a CNAME and point it to the naked domain (still switch it to though).
Thanks Sandro! I just edited the www record to point to my bluehost IP. Is it ok that there is still an A record with this IP:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ?
I didn’t know if I was supposed to delete that record.
thanks Sandro, so I added a CNAME record with value of @ so it is listed as an alias with a proxy. Is this set up the reason that I wasn’t seeing the bluehost IP when I did whatsmydns.net i?
Precisely. All traffic is now going through Cloudflare to your host, effectively hiding your host IP address.
If important to you, you just might want to edit your posting with the original IP address above, respectively flag it so that moderators can remove it (so that the IP doesnt show up).
so is there some way to tell that my dns is correctly set up now? I am asking because bluehost has been saying it can’t confirm that I own the site… and it said creating an A record would fix it, but I added my A record yesterday? (they kept saying it had to propagate… but it has been since yesterday).
so is there some place in Cloudflare that shows the way the domain URL will resolve, or is there only the configuration screen? (btw… thanks so much for your help!)
I am sorry I am really not sure what you mean by that.
The domain will resolve to Cloudflare’s IP addresses at this point, so all requests will go to them and in turn they will forward / relay (proxy) these requests further to your original machine.
my understanding is when I make updates to the DNS tab in Cloudflare, there is a delay for all the DNS servers to be updated. So I wondered if there was some way to determine if the updates had cascaded through all the DNS servers. Does the DNS entry simply have the URL and Cloudflare naming server… I wasn’t sure if anything else in the DNS entry was included ( I have no familiarity with networking )
DNS is set up in a hierarchical fashion and there is caching involved so changes are not immediate but can take some time (this is referred to as propagation time).
Cloudflare specifies relatively short timeframes however and - given they are respected - changes should propagate quickly. In your case it would seem that is already the case as you can see from the site you mentioned earlier, as well as http://sitemeer.com/#www.razor.ink which also already gets the new address.
to 
) or turn it into a 
(proxied)
)