Server Not Found After Enabling Cloudflare and Updating DNS

[slonemcgowan]

Hey everyone,

Not an expert with this stuff, and hoping the answer is obvious to someone else.

I have two domains registered with godaddy, that have sites hosted with Bluehost. Tried to integrate cloudflare by signing up for an account here on the website and following the steps of verifying DNS stuff, and updating the godaddy records with the new name servers provided by cloudflare.

Sites are down. Is this a propagation thing or are there more steps to this?

Sites are http://www.stevedies.com/ and http://www.leekprod.ca/

[robertcope]

Both domains still have their name servers set to Bluehost:

% host -t ns stevedies.com
stevedies.com name server ns1.bluehost.com.
stevedies.com name server ns2.bluehost.com.

% host -t ns leekprod.ca
leekprod.ca name server ns2.bluehost.com.
leekprod.ca name server ns1.bluehost.com.

Your Cloudflare account likely isn’t active and won’t be until your DNS servers are configured to point to Cloudflare’s DNS servers. I guess it is possible that it is a propagation issue. I would double check that the updates were actually done at your registrar (GoDaddy).

[sdayman]

Even without name server propagation, your sites shouldn’t go down. The Bluehost name servers should still properly resolve your hostnames. Check with Bluehost to see if they can figure out why your site isn’t working.

[robertcope]

I’m assuming the sites are down because he has somehow updated DNS to point at Cloudflare but hasn’t actually activated Cloudflare by changing his domain’s DNS servers at his registrar:

$ host www.stevedies.com
www.stevedies.com is an alias for www.stevedies.com.cdn.cloudflare.net.
$ host www.leekprod.ca
www.leekprod.ca is an alias for www.leekprod.ca.cdn.cloudflare.net.

Of course, this is speculation on my part.

[sdayman]

To me, that looks like OP activated Cloudflare at Bluehost, as it looks like a CNAME setup. Something’s tangled up.

[slonemcgowan]

Thanks to everyone that took the time to answer.

My work emails weren’t working either, so was looking for the quickest fix. I changed GoDaddy NS records back to Bluehost, contacted Bluehost support, and they walked me through installing the cloudflare plugin through wordpress which seemed a lot easier.

As far as I can tell I’ve got it figured out. But would be really grateful if someone could double check.

[sdayman]

Neither are using Cloudflare. Without www, it’s served directly from the origin. With www, it’s a CNAME to a non-existent CDN hostname at Cloudflare, so www doesn’t work.

[slonemcgowan]

Thanks!

So just wanna be clear on this one. Following this guide I just updated the nameservers for stevedies to point to cloudflare again. Got an email from cloudflare verifying it’s connected (and the site is still up!)

Now from my cloudflare panel, I add an A record at www that points to the same ip as the ‘@’,‘mail’, etc records ?