Switching to Cloudflare causes my site to stop loading

[joelmarrinan]

Since switching servers to Cloudflare my website does not load on any of my devices - Macbook Chrome, Macbook Safari, Android Chrome, Android Browser. Some of these devices are logged in to my website, others are not. I’ve also tried viewing the site in incognito mode - it hasn’t loaded at any time.

This has occurred about 4-5 hours after switching and now other people can’t access the site either (a few hours ago before they could). I’ve had to return to my servers to BlueHost so that my site works again, but I’d like to use Cloudflare in the future, so please could you let me know why this is happening and how I can avoid it?

Does anyone know what might be causing this?

Thanks,

Joel

[sdayman]

“Website does not load” is not a specific error we can respond to, since your site isn’t on Cloudflare, and you haven’t told us the domain, we can’t offer any suggestions.

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/community-tip-what-to-include-in-your-post/128020/2

[joelmarrinan]

This site can’t be reached

joelstraveltips.com took too long to respond.

Try:

• Checking the connection
• Checking the proxy and the firewall

ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

This is what I mean by ‘does not load’. I can’t visit it or get access to it in any way. I can access my control panel on BlueHost, but I can’t login to the site at all.

The website is joelstraveltips.com

[joelmarrinan]

Hi, I think I’m having similar issues. I switched to Cloudflare today and now my site won’t load at all. Keeps getting timed out messages. Hope there’s a simple way to fix this.

[domjh]

Hi @joelmarrinan,

I have split your post to its own thread as I suspect your issue will be different to the one you posted in.

Your nameservers currently point to Bluehost and it doesn’t look to me like your site is using Cloudflare at the moment. I can open it fine.

What exact error message did you get, was it the 524 or 522 timeout with the Cloudflare icons or something else?

[joelmarrinan]

I just changed the servers back to Bluehost as I couldn’t access my site.

The screenshot above is all I could see. It seemed fine on Cloudflare and BlueHost, but when I went to log into my Wordpress account, the site wouldn’t load at all. Times out and I get this error message.

[joelmarrinan]

I’ve changed the servers back to Cloudflare now, perhaps you can see them now.

[joelmarrinan]

I already have a free SSL certificate from Bluehost btw

[sdayman]

I see the site loads over HTTP as well as HTTPS, so that’s awesome. Hopefully the .235 IP address that’s currently working is the one in your Cloudflare DNS settings page. BlueHost doesn’t typically block Cloudflare, but it’s always worth checking with their Support group to ask.

Community Tip - Fixing Error 522: Connection timed out

Error Try the suggestions in this Community Tip to help you fix Error 522 “ERR CONNECTION TIMED OUT” in Google Chrome or “The connection has timed out” in Firefox. Background A 522 error happens when a TCP connection to the web server could not be established. This typically happens when Cloudflare requests to the origin (your webserver) get blocked. When this happens, you’ll see “ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT”. Quick Fix Ideas Make sure that you’re not blocking Cloudflare IPs in .htaccess, ip…

[joelmarrinan]

Is the site working for you? I am still unable to access the site at all through my home browser and mobile phone.

the .235 IP address is registered for everything in Cloudflare except local host, which has a different IP address. I’ve no idea if that is normal or not.

[joelmarrinan]

I’m trying to check those recommendations to fix 522 errors, but not having much luck so far.

[sdayman]

That site is still going through Bluehost, so I can’t check. If you set the name servers back to Cloudflare, but change all the DNS entries to , it should work just as it does through Bluehost DNS.

EDITED: I accidentally put instead of . Start with Grey just to make sure the site still loads.

[joelmarrinan]

Hi, the name servers should be with cloudflare now. I changed them a couple of hours ago, as below

• cruz.ns.cloudflare.com

• thaddeus.ns.cloudflare.com

There is no option to change the DNS entries in BlueHost to the cloud symbol, there seems to be no Cloudflare options within BlueHost - which is weird as there seems to be loads of records of it being in Bluehost online.

All of the A & CNAME entries are proxied with a cloud symbol - except the ‘local’ one, which has a different IP address and says ‘DNS only - local IP’. Does this need to be changed?

Sorry, I can’t see any options to change this stuff within BlueHost and the materials online seem to say that you can, which is very confusing.

[sdayman]

It’s looking good for me now. It’s not set to “Always Use HTTPS” in the SSL/TLS Edge Certificates section, but www redirects to no-www and works.

[joelmarrinan]

Ok, I’ve switched all those to DNS Only (grey cloud with an arrow over it).

Thanks for checking that. I’ve had someone in Japan and the UK check it, but it seems like it’s not loading here in Korea, as well as some other places. I’ve been using Google Analytics to track which places have had problems loading the page (100% bounce rate, 0.00 page time) and it seems to have happened in several places, including the USA (but some places there are ok, too).

It seems to be quite random so I’m struggling to see what would cause it to be down like this.

Also, it may be an issue with this -

DNSSEC is pending while we wait for the DS to be added to your registrar. This usually takes ten minutes, but can take up to an hour.

I started this about 2 hours ago, not sure how long it might take to complete, but it says an hour.

UPDATE - Thanks for your help, sdayman. Can’t add any new comments so I hope you see this edit. The site suddenly started working after 12 hours of being down and hopefully it’ll stay that way now.

[sdayman]

If SSL says Cloudflare, then it’s working through Cloudflare.

Going way back to the original problem…what you posted looks like a generic DNS error, instead of a Cloudflare error.

If you’ve already set it back to , give it some time to settle in. 48 hours is the longest it should take. Then set it to . Cloudflare has a default TTL of 5 minutes, so after that initial 48 hours, you should be able to back and forth between and pretty quickly if necessary.

[joelmarrinan]

Hi, I wasn’t able to reply to these comments before as I had a new account.

I’ve set all the proxy status options to DNS ONLY (grey cloud) and not cloudflare and whenever I switch to PROXY (orange cloud), my site stops loading after about 5 minutes.

I’ve waited for more than 48 hours but I’m still getting the same problem - the site won’t load and I get an ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT message.

Any idea what might be causing this to happen?

[joelmarrinan]

These are from the cloudflare diagnostics report. I’ve put everything back to DNS ONLY after checking with the proxied orange clouds just now (when it stopped my site from working).

[joelmarrinan]

I’ve reset my DNS to Bluehost for now as I am having several after switching to cloudflare. I hope there is some way to resolve this in the future.