Purchased domain via Cloudflare Registrar - no A record - unable to reach the website

[ludwig]

Hello,

I just purchased a domain on Cloudflare but on the DNS tab there is no A-record. Is this intended or do I just need to wait a little longer, until the A-record shows up?

This is why currently the domain can’t be reached.
All I want to do is to redirect to another page.

Hope anyone can help me with that. I am not an experienced user so sorry upfront for any stupid question (but always happy to learn :). I am particularly asking since I am having another website at Cloudflare that was moved from namecheap and that indeed has a A-record (although I have no idea how it really got there). Now seeing my new website not having that confuses me quite a bit.

Best,
Ludwig

[sdayman]

@ludwig

All I want to do is to redirect to another page.

Try something like this:

Redirecting One Domain to Another

This tutorial covers redirecting one domain to another. For this, we will be redirecting domainA.com to domainB.com. The following settings need to be configured under the domain you are redirecting from, in this example, this is domainA.com Step 1, The DNS Record: The first thing you will need is a DNS record for @, www and any other subdomains you want to redirect, set to . This can point to any IP address as the redirection page rule will execute first. I would recommend pointing…

[ludwig]

Hi sdayman,

thanks for your fast answer. Will try this out!
Can you also clarify why my other page that was moved over from Namecheap came with an A-record, while the one I purchased at Cloudflare did not? Still a little confused about this.

Thanks,
Ludwig

[user4358]

The setup process queries the existing DNS server to try to find and import as many existing DNS records as it can

If you buy a new domain through Cloudflare Registrar it’s a new domain so there’s nothing to query and nothing to import

[ludwig]

Thanks for the answer!

Okay, that makes sense. However back then at Namecheap I also did not have any hosting. Why is it then that I still got an A-record automatically assigned to it?

Best,
Ludwig

[user4358]

Regardless of if you had active hosting or not, there must have been an existing DNS record at the time Cloudflare did the setup otherwise it wouldn’t have imported it, maybe a leftover from something in the past. If you log back into your Namecheap account you might still be able to see it assuming they haven’t deleted the DNS zone completely. You’re free to delete/change the record through the Cloudflare dashboard if you want, although if you’re doing forwarding via Page Rules, you do need to have at least one proxied A, AAAA, or CNAME record for the domain or subdomain you’re forwarding… it doesn’t actually matter what the target of that DNS record is, it can be basically anything, as the Page Rule will be intercepting and forwarding the traffic elsewhere.

[ludwig]

Understood! Thanks so much for you patience and time!