CNAME Resolution through third party site

[mitul]

Dear Community Friends ,

Our domain is indiashopps being put on Cloudflare.

We have partnered with a media site (hindustantimes). They have created a sub-domain for us on their own domain (indiashopps)

They have created the subdomain : indiashopps by using A entry with our server IP.
We are also using Godaddy’s SSL certificate on the Host server. It was working fine.

Now we want to use CDN, so we asked Hindustantimes to change A record to CNAME record and replace IP with htimes.indiashopps.com

At our Cloudflare we created htimes as a A entry with IP. Without switching cloud icon / CDN …its working. But when we switch on the cloud icon to use CDN it stops working.

So we then created a CNAME entry for htimes pointing to h1times.indiashopps.com and inturn created h1times A record with IP.

Still its not working.

Hope I am able to explain our requirements / issue.

Please guide what are we missing & how to resolve.

Looking forward for quick help & guidance.

Regards,
Mitul

[sdayman]

Right now, it looks like htimes.indiashopps.com is an A record using an IP address.

You should be able to keep that A record and just it. What happens when you do this? If it doesn’t work, please describe how it’s not working.

I think the problem is that htimes.indiashopps.com does not have SSL. If hindustantimes can not add SSL for your subdomain, then you will have to add a Page Rule:
Match: htimes.indiashopps.com/*
Add Setting: SSL set to Flexible

Make this the first rule in you Page Rule list.

[mitul]

Thanks for your reply.

We have changed SSL set to Flexible for entire domain. Then we switched on the Orange Cloud of htimes. (It has no probs …htimes.indiashopps.com works normally)

Subdomain on partner site started giving errors. (indiashopps.hindustantimes.com)
Check the screenshots …2 screenshots 1 with https & and 2nd with http only.

Since its a Live subdomain , now we have removed the Orange cloud on htimes. SSL is still set to Flexible. After removing cloud it has started working again.

Please have a look.

Appreciate your help.

[sdayman]

I think I understand now.

indiashopps.com is yours
htimes.indiashopps.com is also yours

We can get those to work through Cloudflare.

indiashopps.hindustantimes.com points to htimes.indiashopps.com with a CNAME and does not work when htimes.indiashopps.com is using Cloudflare.

Cloudflare won’t let an outside domain CNAME to your domain. Hindustantimes will need to use an A record with the IP address, which I think you said they were doing until you asked them to change it to a CNAME.

[mitul]

Yes, now you got the entire scenario right.

Earlier hindustantimes used an A record with IP.
We wanted to use CDN hence gave them htimes.indiashopps.com to be used as CNAME.

With IP we cant use CDN / caching hence dont get the benefits of faster loading.

Please guide any alternatives or workaround.

Thanks,

[sdayman]

You can’t CDN a domain that’s not yours. So anything that shows up under Hindustantimes.com has to be optimized by them.

If it makes you feel better, the homepage loads in about 1 second for me on a 400Mbps connection in Los Angeles.

The only option I can think of is to use a third party CDN, like KeyCDN. So cached resources will come from something like indiashopps.keycdn.com/assets/…/image.jpg

[mitul]

Oh, never knew that to CDN it’s mandatory to own n host entire domain. Thought we could bypass by using CNAME

We have optimized the homepage by making the content into Jason file n loading it without going to any DB or extra round trips plus some other ways

Will explore keycdn…it sounds like Cloudfront from Amazon.

Thanks for help.

Regards,