I added a domain I own and manage in LiquidWeb to Cloudflare (CF). This domain host/serves images that are used on many different websites that I also own. After updating the LiquidWeb namer servers to the ones provided by CF, the image links broke on all of the websites that use images from that domain. Assume this is a DNS propagation issue and it takes time to fully propagate? Any idea of how long? I let it go 30 minutes and my product users were having a bad experience so I reverted the name servers back to LqiuidWeb’s which resolved the issue after about 20 minutes. I was also not able to access the former website directly through a browser after pointing the DNS name servers to CF getting SSL errors. Customer Support a LiquidWeb could not resolve the issue and said I had to contact CF support to figure out what was causing the problem.
My questions are: 1) how long does it take to propagate the DNS name servers so that my other websites that need images off of this newly cached CF service will work correctly? 2) How do I resolve the SSL issue so that I can still access the website to login and manage my media directly?
DNS propagation is hard to put a number on - as it relies on a number of parties (eg. your registrar, third-party resolvers) - but typically there shouldnt be any broken links on images, because the original links should continue to work.
I think we’d need more information as to what errors you were seeing, to understand what exactly what was happening.
In terms your SSL certificates, following the guide above
Unproxying your DNS records on Cloudflare
Moving back to our nameservers
Verifying that your Universal SSL certificate has deployed under SSL/TLS > Edge Certificates
Thank you for the helpful information. It appears I did not deploy the Universal SSL correctly. Everything is working correctly now.
I am try the Argo Smart Routing on my domain. While my site only has about 5,000 visitors a month, each page is dynamically created at runtime so I am not able to cash the actual page text content but only the images, and certain css and js files. Given every request still has to go to the origin server to execute the php and retrieve the html from the database, I was wondering if Argo would make a significant difference for a site as small as mine. Would appreciate your thoughts.
My main goal at this time is improving user experience with faster page load times and other Core Web Vitals metrics.
It is difficult to answer that question without knowing more about your site.
These are the questions I typically ask when it comes to Argo Smart Routing.
Where is my origin web server located/hosted (geographically?)
Where is the majority of my client’s browsing to my website from?
Which Cloudflare datacenters are processing the majority of my clients traffic?
If your server is hosted geographically, let’s say somewhere on east coast US - and your website is a business that is focused mainly on eastern US - then most of your visitors are more than likely going to be browsing from that state and hitting Cloudflare datacenters in Eastern US - if this is the case, then Argo is not going to have much impact, because your users are more than likely using the fastest route available.
However, if you have a website with a global audience and the distribution of traffic is Cloudflare datacenters all over the globe, then Argo will benefit those datacenters further away because it will be intelligently able to find the fastest route to get to your host, or route around bad network conditions that are more likely to happen the further network packets have to go.