How to hide origin URL from visitors

Website, Application, Performance
1

I thought this is kinda what CF is about, but it seems it is not so simple or I am looking through wrong menus.

I am creating dynamic pages and pushing them to AWS S3 buckets. Those pages have an ugly URL, which I want to hide with pretty domain names.

How can I have my examplecom at Cloudflare and have all requests to example.com redirected/tunneled to the origin server at xxx_yyy_zzz_amazonaws.com? I can’t use the HTTP 301, because then the browser will show the actual URL of AWS.

Also can all this be done with the Cloudflare REST API?

4

The problem is, AWS buckets do not support https on your own subdomain, but only via s3.amazonaws.com/bucketname.

To get your subdomain working with https, you first need to set up Cloudfront in front of your bucket and configure it to use https.

When you have done that, you can point your domain to your Cloudfront address.

1 Like
5

Hmm ok what if I do not care if the bucket does only work with HTTP? CF would terminate TLS and then use http with origin server? Is this possible? Since the website content is static I do not really care about TLS all the way to the origin.

Really I am just trying to cut costs here and that is the reason I want to drop CloudFront from the equation. If I have understood correctly I do not need Route53 in any way?

Maybe this is not the most cost effective way to do dynamic pages with proper domains? I might just rent a web hotel and get a lot of web pages for 2$/month.

The idea was born because CF offers free DNS and if seemed logical to use S3 buckets as a cheap way to host the actual files. “How to provide a cheap simple web page to a customer with almost at the cost a just a domain?”.

6

That is possible with the Flexible SSL option in Cloudflare, but I absolutely cannot recommend using that.

Most man in the middle attacks happen on the visitors network, so it seems that encryption between the visitor and Cloudflare would substantially increase security.

But, in my opinion, this increases the potential severity of an attack between Cloudflare and your origin.

A successful attacker is able to manipulate the content on your website, and visitors might trust the manipulated content, as it seems to be end-to-end encrypted.

I don’t believe in this argument. What content you display on your site doesn’t matter at all when an attacker can change the content a visitor sees.

Why not use Cloudflare Pages if you only want to serve static content? It is both secure and free.

2 Likes
7

I need to look into CF Pages. I have not even heard of the term ever.

My need is to create a page programmatically, upload to server and then host it with the domain the user has bought from me. “Free” sounds about my ball park cost wise.

If all this this is usable via CF REST API then this might be exavtly what I am looking for. I just need the domain to stay as it is and not change to some random subdomain like it does with S3

8

Hmm can I use Cloudflare to hide this site url that I get from Cloudflare Pages and use my on domain name?

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Thx. It seems to work now with apex cname.

I have to check the free sub terms, if that supports unlimited sites with a custom domain per each site. Otherwise this seems to fit all my needs!

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