Confusion about the need for "www"

Website, Application, Performance Getting Started
1

I am moving my website to a new hosting. I have enabled the free CF plan for the website while on the first hosting. I have just reconfigured the DNS settings to point to the new IP of the second host and it seems to be working fine. So far, so good. I went into the interface of my new hosting to enable the CF integration and provided my existing CF account credentials. However before enabling the actual free plan, I see the following very odd statement:

“Please note that Cloudflare cannot work properly unless your website is accessed
through WWW. We will perform a check to see if your website is configured to work
with WWW and if not, we will configure it for you. A proper redirect for your URLs
without WWW will be set for SEO purposes. If your site without WWW has already
been heavily indexed by search engines, you should allow some propagation time for
the changes to be reflected by the search engines. If you want to configure WWW
manually, leave the box unchecked.”

I can’t understand that. Can someone please explain? My website is working fine with CF without WWW (although I have a CNAME record in CF for www but I guess it’s just in case if someone accesses my website with www.mydomain.com). If I enable that option on my new hosting, I am afraid it will mess up everything and will make my website to redirect people from mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com. Can someone explain all that and whether I should ignore it?

And another question here. Is CF somehow having contracts with these hosting companies? Or is this free plan totally independent from the hosting company? I am asking because I’m wondering whether CF can somehow cut-off my website when I cancel my plan with the first hosting company and don’t enable the CF with the second hosting company? (and I’m hesitating because of the WWW thing which I’m afraid would mess my website up).

2

Whatever hosting provider you are using requires you to have a CNAME for each hostname. DNS does not permit a CNAME to exist at the root of a domain.

(Technically, a CNAME cannot exist if there is any other DNS entry, but there is always a SOA record at the root of a domain, which gives rise to the limitation there. But the limitation exists anywhere you want to place a CNAME.)

No idea. But the free plan is available to anybody with a domain name, and you can use the CF free plan with (almost) any hosting provider, without the provider needing any CF integration. Frankly, a lot of the integrations are poor, and I would always just configure my own CF settings independently of the hosting provider.

1 Like
3

I don’t understand this. Can you please clarify? Currently in the DNS settings of my Cloudflare account I have two records:

A: “mydomain.com” → host_IP
CNAME: “www” → “mydomain.com”

This works perfectly and my users are having no problems at all and they access the site by only mydomain.com and not through www.mydomain.com (which also works)

However the message by the hosting company says that accessing the website through only “mydomain.com” would cause problems with Cloudflare, at least that’s my understanding. That’s where my confusion is. I’m wondering why they say something that seems to not be true. But I’ll have to reach to they support I guess.

Seems like I shouldn’t bother with their CF integration because things are working perfectly right now and I managed CF through CF which is OK with me.

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