Confused about using R2 with external registrar

Developers Storage
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We are wanting to use R2 to host a bunch of files for our website. We’ve added a credit card to our free account and copied about 650GB of files to R2. I am trying to make the files publicly available so they can be accessed via our website. I am confused about what to do next.

  • With our Web host, they give use the DNS settings to use for the website, and we enter them into our registrar’s DNS control panel. I can’t find anything like that for Cloudflare.

  • In R2, in the settings for one of the buckets, under Public access, under Custom Domains, it says “Connect Domain” but when I type in a new subdomain to use for the bucket, it says “that domain was not found on your account”, so I can’t add it.

  • In R2, in the settings for one of the buckets, under Public access, under R2.dev subdomain, it says “Not allowed”, and it also says “not recommended for production”.

  • On the public buckets documentation page, Public buckets · Cloudflare R2 docs it says that a custom domain must belong to the same account as the R2 bucket. Does that mean the domain has to be transferred to Cloudflare? We don’t want to do that, because the current registrar is also hosting email for the domain.

  • The docs for setting up a partial (cname) zone Set up a partial (CNAME) zone · Cloudflare DNS docs says “A partial (CNAME) setup allows you to use Cloudflare’s reverse proxy while maintaining your primary and authoritative DNS provider.” which is what we want, but it also says that it is only available on a Business or Enterprise plan. We weren’t planning on using any of the Business or Enterprise features as we only really want to host the files on R2 at this time.

Somehow I got the impression that R2 could be used by paying only for the storage space we use, but now it looks like we have to (A) also pay $20/mo for the Business plan, or (B) transfer our domain to Cloudflare.

Is that right?

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So, there are two things that “transferring a domain to Cloudflare” can mean, and only one of them is operative here. To clear up any confusion, you do not need to transfer your domain registration to Cloudflare. Cloudflare does offer a registrar service, but it’s only there as a convenience, and there are no other Cloudflare features that depend on you using the registrar service.

But in order to use a custom domain with R2 (or many other products) you need to transfer your authoritative DNS to Cloudflare. This doesn’t mean you can’t use email service elsewhere (in fact, Cloudflare doesn’t even provide email service). You would need to add the domain to Cloudflare, and then (re)create the domain’s DNS records on Cloudflare. Then, at your domain registrar, you change the nameserver settings to point to Cloudflare. As long as the email DNS records are the same as before, everything should continue to work the same, but now you’ll have access to Cloudflare features like custom domains on R2.

I’d suggest looking over the “getting started” docs, paying particular attention to section 3, “Add your domain to Cloudflare”.

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