I'm kind of lost, newbie help

Website, Application, Performance Getting Started
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I have a webserver at home which I have had on/off for a few years now. When I learn something I try to put into practice. Some (long) years ago it was php, these days I’ve become good with python at work and wanted to start my personal website.

I wanted to have SSL and checking what my options were. The easiest was a self-signed certificate that was for sure more than enough for my needs. It was just a pain to have always the untrusted warning everywhere I tried to connect.

So I heard about Cloudflare and the free SSL solution they have. I also decided to buy a very cheap domain (1$/year) on namecheap.

I created both accounts and changed the nameservers on namecheap for the ones that are given by Cloudflare, but now what? How do I actually connect my homeserver to cloudlflare/domain? Is it on namecheap account is it now on Cloudflare account since I changed the nameservers.

I realize that I bit more that I can chew but I really thought this was gonna be easier to wrap my head around.

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Once you change the name servers to what Cloudflare told you, your webserver traffic will now route through Cloudflare.

Have you entered your home web server’s IP address into Cloudflare’s DNS for your domain? And is it set to :orange: now?

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OK I understand what I had to do know. I was trying to delete one of the entries in the DNS table in Cloudflare and realized what I actually looking at. It is working as intended now.

Now, to set up SSL!

Thanks for your time!

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Fellow newbie here. I have 2 CNAMES in DNS Records - the 1st has no-cloud (neither gray nor orange) and the 2nd has an Orange Cloud. How can I get an Orange Cloud on the 1st?

My domain name was purchased through Google Domains. It redirects to to a Ghost (blogging platform) domain.

DNS Records
CNAME, ‘mydomain-dot-com’, is an alias of ‘fname-lname-dot-ghost-dot-io’, Automatic, NO-CLOUD
CNAME, www, is an alias of ‘mydomain-dot-com’, Automatic, Orange Cloud

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I’m pretty sure Ghost already runs Cloudflare, so you can’t :orange: a CNAME that’s pointed to a domain that’s already using Cloudflare. I suspect the only reason you can :orange: the www is because Cloudflare doesn’t check for recursive CNAMEs (which is unadvisable). Both CNAMEs should point to the same origin at Ghost.

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@sdayman - your absolutely correct. just a moment ago I got a response from ghost.io support saying essentially the same - they manage their own Cloudflare CDN. Thanks!

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