Multiple websites on one CNAME

DNS & Network
#1

Hello at all,

I need an advise from the team. I have configured everything fine on cloudlare (PRO account).
I have a main domain name (ie: maindomain.com) with two main apps on subdomains (www. and web.). Everything works fine for www. But web. is a little bit specific : it is a CNAME and I have 73 others domains using this CNAME because we provide websites to our customers. All these website are pointing on the same app via the web. CNAME.

At the first place, I did NOT want to add all these domains to Cloudflare. My idea was to proxy web. only and make sure all assets are pulled from my web. subdomain.

For example:

  • www.customerdomain1.com and www.customerdomain2.com are pointing to web.maindomain.com CNAME
  • currently web.maindomain.com is handled by CloudFlare but not proxied.
  • I wanted to make sure that images for these customer’s domains were pulled from web.maindomain.com/~customer-slug1/images/image.png. So I enabled proxy for web.maindomain.com

But doing so, all my customer’s websites crashed because it seems that Cloudflare detected they were pointing to maindomain.com so Cloudflare tried to proxy them as well but SSL resolution failed (normal). Is it correct?

So my questions are:

  • how can I proxy web.maindomain.com without having to add 74+ domains to Cloudflare?
  • Does Cloudflare even support that many domains for one given account?
  • Will I have to pay $20*74?
  • And finally, in the case I should add all the domains to Cloudflare, how to take care of the 74 domains configurations on CloudFlare?
#2

It sounds like you are a SaaS Provider, and you need to use Cloudflare for SaaS. This enables the precise scenario you are suggesting. Your customers point their DNS for www.customer.com to web.maindomain.com, and you have a configuration that presents a certificate for www.customer.com and uses your defined origin etc.

That is a relatively small number of domains compared to some customers. Just as a best practice, adding all your customers domains to one account is not recommended, both for you or for them. But if you go the SaaS route this is not a concern.

SaaS is $2 per hostname per month.

1 Like
#3

Hello @michael, I think we can say we are a SaaS provider in some ways. But we are a tiny french company. We have only 70 customers. We just manage theirs websites.

Thanks anyways, I understand your answer. We don’t have the resources (financial, employees and time) to manage the add/edit/delete for all our domains. I’ll find a workaround.

Kind regards

#4

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