Traffic No Longer Going Through Cloudflare

A couple weeks ago I set up https on my site (Let’s Encrypt on the hosting server, and on the Cloudflare side Full Strict SSL and Universal SSL enabled) and everything worked properly (Green Padlock) and I didn’t re-check everything until today. I ran a webpagetest and saw that a CDN was not being used. So I double checked at the Cloudflare site under Analytics and I see that traffic was flowing through Cloudflare for only a couple days after setting up https, but since 02-27-2018 there has been no traffic. I can verify that the site indeed had traffic by checking Google Analytics. Cloudlfare is turned on, and not in development or under attack mode.

Where do I start to troubleshoot this? Here is the website:

https://www.flaminghellmet.com

As I side note there is a message that appears when I log into Cloudflare. What is this and do i need to activate it?

“New! Edge computing for everyone: Cloudflare Workers. Activate”

I would recommend contacting the host you signed up for Cloudflare with/through as they control your DNS settings. At the moment your www record is not pointing to Cloudflare but instead directly to the origin and that setting is managed/ controlled by your partner.

  1. So, in the Cloudflare app in the Control Panel I have:

Domain = flaminghellmet.com
Cloudflare Plan = Free Website
Zone Type = partial
Use Cloudflare = active

The following records are turned ON with a TTL of 1:

TYPE NAME VALUE

CNAME www.flaminghellmet.com. Cloudflare-resolve-to.flaminghellmet.com

CNAME flaminghellmet.com. Cloudflare-resolve-to.flaminghellmet.com

  1. And in the Zone Editor in the Control Panel I have “A” records:

NAME TTL CLASS TYPE RECORD
flaminghellmet.com. 1800 IN A 198.20.92.30
www.flaminghellmet.com 1800 IN A 198.20.92.30

And the following “CNAME” records:

NAME TTL CLASS TYPE RECORD
Cloudflare-resolve-to.flaminghellmet.com. 1400 IN
CNAME flaminghellmet.com

I didn’t change anything i i thought everything worked. What do i need to change to fix it?

Doesn’t appear that control panel is currently synchronized with your DNS servers (whatever that means for your hosting provider).

dig flaminghellmet.com ns +short
ns1.stablehost.com.
ns2.stablehost.com.

dig www.flaminghellmet.com +short
198.20.your.ip

OK, so would I have to contact my hosting provider and find out why?

Yeah unfortunately, hosting providers can configure their backend systems in a lot of ways so it isn’t possible for me to tell you exactly how/what the next steps should be. They may have logs on their side they can check.

This is/was assuming that your hosting provider manages your DNS records here:
ns1.stablehost.com.
ns2.stablehost.com.

If you instead control the DNS for those, you may be able to create the records with the same values you referenced above as appearing in your control panel:

CNAME www.flaminghellmet.com. Cloudflare-resolve-to.flaminghellmet.com
CNAME flaminghellmet.com. Cloudflare-resolve-to.flaminghellmet.com

Thanks for the help…I opened a ticket with them. i will report back with the results.

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The hosting partner claimed they fixed it by resubmitting my websites with Cloudlfare. I do see traffic in the Cloudflare Analytics page again, and I am seeing the Cloudflare certificate when accessing my web sites, so i guess it is OK. Not sure how to test that my Let’s encrypt certificate is still working from the sever to Cloudflare though.

If your Cloudflare domain is set to Full (Strict), then you’re using a legitimate SSL certificate on your server. Just plain Full is for self-signed certificates. Flexible is when there’s no SSL on your server.

If your domain is set to Full (Strict) and your Let’s Encrypt certificate is broken or gone (and there’s not other legitimate SSL certificate there), you’ll get an error that shows the secure connection between Cloudflare and your server is broken.

@sdayman. OK, then everything is working end to end.

Now that the DNS has propagated, here are the changes that Stablehost made. I think something is still wrong because the site without www still points to the stablehost dns servers and the let’s encrypt certificate. i am going to mention this in the Stablehost ticket.

  1. Stablehost statement:

“I had to re-add both domains to fix the issue. If the same behavior happens again, I would recommend you to login directly at https://Cloudflare.com end and register the domains there and change the nameservers from the domain registrar.”

  1. Stablehost made some domain changes. Here is how they stand now according to the zone editor:

NAME TTL CLASS TYPE RECORD
a) flaminghellmet.com. 1800 IN A 198.20.92.30
b) www.flaminghellmet.com. 1400 IN CNAME www.flaminghellmet.com.cdn.Cloudflare.net
c) Cloudflare-resolve-to.flaminghellmet.com. 1400 IN A 198.20.92.30

  1. If I run the various dig commands I get the following:

a) DIG SELECTING THE NAMESERVER OPTION

dig flaminghellmet.com ns +short
ns1.stablehost.com.
ns2.stablehost.com.

dig www.flaminghellmet.com ns+short
www.flaminghellmet.com.cdn.Cloudflare.net.

b) DIG SELECTING UNSPECIFIED OR DEFAULT OPTIONS

dig flaminghellmet.com +short
198.20.92.30

dig www.flaminghellmet.com +short
www.flaminghellmet.com.cdn.Cloudflare.net.
104.28.13.58
104.28.12.58

EDIT: I got a response about the www vs non-www situation, and their reply was:

“By partial setup, you won’t be able to protect the naked domain. Please check the following URL for details: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169886-Can-I-use-a-naked-domain-no-www-with-Cloudflare-

Whatever that all means.

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