Cloudflare Registrar Purchased Domain with Hostinger Hosting (DNS and Nameserver Guidance)

[user24613]

Hello,

Reaching out for guidance on how to properly configure my DNS and nameservers (and where) with the following scenarios (and appreciation in advance for your patience, as I’m still learning how all of this ties together when it’s not a two-in-one setup).

For prior sites connected to Cloudflare, the domain registrar has been elsewhere (e.g. Domain and GoDaddy), which was also the hosting service, so I’m now confused about what needs to be configured where with the below scenario with Cloudflare both as the registrar AND the website security cop (but not the host).

Scenario #1: Cloudflare Registrar Domain with Hostinger Website Hosting

1. Purchased a domain directly from Cloudflare Registrar (then realized they don’t offer hosting)
2. Set up a hosting account with Hostinger
3. In my Hostinger WEBSITE hosting panel, it’s showing the nameservers as those for Hostinger. The DOMAINS are all noted as EXTERNAL domains
4. I went into the Cloudflare DNS and added the www and @ records referencing the Hostinger IP address

Q: Is this correct? What am I missing here? Do I need to do something else? There is very little documentation on what to do AFTER you purchase a Cloudflare domain to properly set it up and link to a website hosting platform (they’re all based on if you transfer a domain to Cloudflare and it just copies over the origin DNS records that were set up along with its web hosting), so I’m unclear of two things:

1. IF and HOW I can update the nameservers on Hostinger to reference Cloudflare’s (and if I’m supposed to or not)
2. Which place am I supposed to manage any DNS changes and rules - Cloudflare or Hostinger?

I’m debating just moving the domain registration over to Hostinger to make this easier and truly all in one place, but I feel like I’m either overcomplicating this or missing something.

Scenario #2: Transferred Domain into Cloudflare and transfer of SITE HOSTING to Hostinger
In this case, in an effort to have all of my DOMAINS in one place, I transferred a few existing ones over to Cloudflare. I also did the same with having all of my website hosting now on Hostinger.

In this case, similar questions to above:

1. Where am I managing the DNS records?
2. Do I need to change the nameservers of the WEBSITE HOSTING somehow?

Thank you

[Laudian]

@user24613

Is this correct?

Yes, but that is not all there is to do.

Generally, there are 3 steps:

1. Add either A, AAAA or CNAME records that direct your domain toward your hosting provider. You did this.
2. Configure your webserver to serve the website when your domain is called. Servers can be configured to either serve the same website for all names or different websites for different nsmes, but the 2nd is more common. You might have done this, I’m not sure from reading your dedcription.
3. Install a valid SSL certificate for your domain on the webserver and change SSL settings in Cloudflare to Full (strict) and minimum TLS version 1.2. You might want to use a Cloudflare Origin Certificate for this (google the tutorial).