Recently signed up for Cloudflare Plus through SiteGround. When I activated CF for a subdomain, it said www was required for it to work. However, I don’t want a www.subdomain.domain.com. The site was already set up without the www. The www version is showing under CF’s SSL tab.
Do I HAVE to use the www? If so, why? If not, then how do I remove it?
I think this might be affecting the WAF rules that I’ve set up. The rules are working for the root domain but they aren’t working for the subdomain.
In particular, I have one rule that blocks traffic when “URI” “Contains” “wp-admin”. This works great for the root.
You’d have to check with SiteGround, as they control your account. It’s not going to work to use www for a subdomain, as Cloudflare SSL certificates only go one subdomain deep. Putting a www in front makes it a second level subdomain.
The www prefix generally applies only to root domains, as some RFC says you can’t CNAME a root domain, which is probably how SiteGround sets up Cloudflare Plus.
Reached out to SiteGround, this was their response:
Thank you for contacting Help Desk.
If your domain’s DNS zone is managed by Cloudflare, you could use their services with naked domain (non-www), but if you switch your DNS zone to their system, you would have to copy all the changes to your existing zone on our servers to your Cloudflare zone.
The Cloudflare service we provide works only via www subdomain. I am afraid, we can’t make any changes to that behaviour.
Their response is correct, but doesn’t really answer the question! You can only use it on a subdomain of your main domain. i.e. www.domain.com , not domain.com which is what they said.
What they didn’t cover is subdomains, theoretically, sub.domain.com is possible, but only they know about their setup and whether they require you to have www.sub.domain.com.