Subdomains with external DNS

#1

Hi,

My site is running on a CPanel server and I use a Cloudflare Free account. DNS is with the CPanel server rather than Cloudflare (it’s actually with a 3rd party DNS provider but I just make the necessary changes to the zone there).

Things work fine for my domain name and I have www as a CNAME entry pointing to www.mydomain.co.uk.cdn.cloudflare.net.

I have a subdomain that runs a different CMS. How do I get this to run on Cloudflare? In CPanel I go to the Cloudflare section and click domains. I can see the subdomain as an A record pointing to the server’s IP and I click the “on” button to use cloudflare and that goes green. The entry stays as an A record though, I was hoping it would change into a CNAME that I could copy and enter into my third party DNS provider but as an A record it won’t go through Cloudflare.

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

#2

It sounds like you want an unaffiliated DNS for some other domain to point to a Cloudflare-fronted subdomain. That’s not possible.

#3

I’ve got my main site running under www.domain.com and my billing system running on billing.domain.com and wanted them both to run under cloudflare, so not really an unaffiliated domain. But if it’s not possible then it’s not possible.

Thanks for your advice :slight_smile:

#4

It seems to be a partner/CNAME setup. That might make things even more difficult.

#5

But why wouldn’t that Partner DNS let you add a custom DNS entry that would work?

I’m not clear on how that third party DNS fits into this. If cPanel is for example.com, and billing is hosted elsewhere, but still under example.com, they should be able to add the Billing DNS entry to cPanel so it goes through Cloudflare. Maybe.

#6

I am not saying it wouldnt, I wanted to elaborate on your “not possible” remark. The setup is not quite clear to me to be honest.

#7

In this case example.com and billing.example.com are both on the same CPanel server. I’d hoped they’d be able to both go under Cloudflare but looks like I might have to register a new domain for the billing panel to have it run under Cloudflare.

#8

This is a convoluted series of hoops you’re going through just to get this working.

Why aren’t you using Cloudflare for your DNS?

#9

For some of my DNS entries I need DNS failover, so DNS is hosted with DNS Made Easy.