I have a site that I no longer need setup with Cloudflare. There is an issue with it and I have to change my DNS back from Cloudflare to my original hosts. I’ve added my hosts NS records in the DNS dashboard in Cloudflare but when I do a dns lookup online, it’s still showing the Cloudflare records.
I also tried deleting my domain from Cloudflare but that didn’t work either.
Just set the DNS records to be grey clouded in the DNS control panel. Then Cloudflare will just be serving the true origin IP address and won’t be proxying the traffic. I can’t think of a reason you’d need to change your DNS back to the previous host. But as @sandro says you can change back by setting whatever nameserver you need at your registrar.
Thanks for the replies. I tried setting my DNS to the grey cloud but it’s not working - my nameservers are still showing as Cloudflare. I’ve asked my hosts if they can change the name servers but 4 different people have now said that they can’t do anything because my name servers are with Cloudflare. They’re saying that I need to make the change through Cloudflare
Unless you are using WIX or a handful of other questionably questionable hosting providers for your site there is no requirement that your name servers be managed by your hosting provider. If that really is a requirement of your hosting provider :sigh: then yes you need to change your name servers at your registrar.
With a normal web host you just point your DNS entires to their service wherever the DNS happens to be hosted.
Well, I can understand why a host would want to control a customer’s DNS records. Changing IP address might be practically impossible if they dont and dont have cooperative/experienced customers.
In this case however it is not clear why the OP wants/needs to move away, he simply stated the desire.
If there were a better DNS provider than Cloudflare I would use their service in a CNAME setup, but their DNS is pretty hard to beat so for me it’s a win/win.
Thats certainly an option, but there still is nothing inherently wrong with A records and we shouldnt all need to dump them just because some people want to outsource their DNS provider
If you are a fortune 500 company who uses 200 different services at the whim of your marketing teams it is literally impossible to point your name servers at all of them. To your earlier point if a customer is unable or unwilling to manage their own DNS, the level of abstraction that CNAME records provide allow the provider to make changes without the need for the customer to do anything.
DNS being tied to a particular hosting provider is, relatively speaking, a new phenomenon. Rackspace is a great hosting company, but they are literally 8x slower for DNS than Cloudflare https://www.dnsperf.com/ I can envision a number of scenarios where I might have them host infrastructure for me, but 0 where I’d have them host my DNS (not that they have that type of random requirement).
And I should point out that Rackspace can give me a static IP address for my services, so an A record works just fine if I want to use it. But I’d still CNAME other hosts to a single A record if I was running the infrastructure on a single VM, makes it much easier to update if I do need to change IPs/hosts.
I was not referring to anything remotely on that level - where you usually find people who can and will update DNS records - but to classic shared hosting.
New might be relative, but it was already a common thing in the early 2000s.
Anyhow, we got a bit offtopic. The OP asked how to move away from Cloudflare and I guess this has been answered by now.