Registering on Cloudflare hosting/email elsewhere

[Crazyhorse]

This is most lileky a dumb question but please bear with me.

DNS shouldn’t be hard to figure out but I can’t!

Cloudflare have just written to me (cant reply of course – don’t you just hate that) to suggest I register my domain with them. Looks a good deal and I would be happy to do that … BUT … I do not understand how I can have the domain registered with Cloudflare but the website associated with that domain on my existing hosting account. And then there are the emails associated with the domain. How does that work?

Please can someone either explain it to me or point me to some document that I will be able to understand.

Thanks in advance

Philip

[fritex]

Greetings,

Thank you for asking.

It all can work well.

For example you can have:

1. Domain at some domain registrar (for example Namecheap)
2. Domain is pointed to Cloudflare, meaning managing DNS and other Cloudflare features is done at Cloudflare (DNS)
3. Hosting is on a server, some 3rd-party provider (for example Netcup)
4. E-mail is from 3rd-party provider (for example Google Workspace)

Also you can have:

1. Domain at some domain registrar
2. Domain using Cloudflare (DNS)
3. Hosting and e-mail at the same provider (cPanel, shared web hosting)

or

1. Domain registered at Cloudflare
2. Domain using Cloudflare (DNS)
3. Hosting somewhere without e-mail
   or
4. Hosting somewhere with email, same provider
   or
5. Hosting somewhere
6. Email somewhere else
   or
7. No hosting, only email somewhere
8. No hosting, no e-mail, using only Cloudflare Email forwarding feature

Or some other combination if so.

[Crazyhorse]

Thanks, that is helpful. What I need to know is the specific DNS settings to achieve:

1. domain registered on Cloudflare (and using Cloudflare DNS)
2. Website hosted on Ionos
3. email boxes handled by Ionos
4. email forwarding handled by Cloudflare?

I guess I need DNS primer!