This tutorial is deprecated as the issue has been addressed - see How Orange-to-Orange (O2O) works · Cloudflare for Platforms docs
Archive
This community tutorial covers what is known as the ‘orange to orange problem’. 
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What is the issue?
If a service that other users then point their domains to uses Cloudflare, it can create a problem if both the domain of the site and the hostname it points to is set to .
Take a web host for example, we’ll call them host.com. host.com asks their customers to point their domains to customer.host.com and decides to use Cloudflare and sets their DNS records to . Then a customer wants to use host.com with their own domain, customer.com but they also use Cloudflare and want to set their record to . They point www.customer.com to customer.host.com and set that record to . This created a conflict… As Matthew Prince puts it, ‘whose settings should win’.
Shopify started to use Cloudflare. That creates a conflict with customers that are already using Cloudflare on their domains (i.e., whose settings should win). We call it the orange-to-orange problem and we're working on it with them and other platforms.
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) March 21, 2019
What Cloudflare currently does about it
Currently, any record pointing to a host is automatically set to 
and cannot be changed to . Going back to the example above, this means that because customer.host.com is set to , www.customer.com cannot be and is therefore set to . This means that certain Cloudflare services such as page rules and workers cannot currently be used in this situation.
This is something that Cloudflare is working on
We’re working on it.
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) March 21, 2019
With some providers using Cloudflare, it may be possible to proxy your site and have some working settings, but this is very much provider-specific and is not currently widely available.
Tutorial Reference: CT-42
Reviewed: 08/21
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