Setting Up Cloudflare

This guide walks you through creating a Cloudflare account, adding your domain, and switching your nameservers to activate Cloudflare's CDN and security features with your Ultra Web Hosting account.

Before You Begin

Before setting up Cloudflare, make sure you have:

An active Ultra Web Hosting account with your website already working.
Access to your domain registrar (where you purchased your domain) to change nameservers.
Your hosting server's IP address, which you can find in your welcome email or in cPanel under Server Information.

Note We recommend getting your website fully set up and working on Ultra Web Hosting before adding Cloudflare. This way, if anything goes wrong during the Cloudflare setup, you can easily identify whether the issue is with your hosting or with Cloudflare's configuration.

Step-by-Step Setup

1. Create a Cloudflare Account

Go to dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up.
Enter your email address and create a password.
Verify your email address by clicking the link Cloudflare sends you.

2. Add Your Domain to Cloudflare

Once logged in, click Add a site on the Cloudflare dashboard.
Enter your domain name (e.g., yourdomain.com) and click Add site.
Cloudflare will automatically scan your domain's existing DNS records. This process takes about 30-60 seconds. Let it complete — it is attempting to import all of your current DNS records so nothing breaks when you switch nameservers.

3. Review Imported DNS Records

After the scan, Cloudflare will display all the DNS records it found. This is a critical step — carefully review the list to make sure everything was imported correctly.

Warning Cloudflare's automatic scan does not always catch every record. Before switching nameservers, compare what Cloudflare imported against your current DNS records in cPanel's Zone Editor. Missing records (especially MX records for email) will cause services to break once you switch. See DNS Migration to Cloudflare for a detailed walkthrough.

Pay special attention to:

A records — Your main domain and any subdomains should point to your Ultra Web Hosting server IP.
MX records — Essential for email delivery. These must be present and correct.
CNAME records — For subdomains like www or other aliases.
TXT records — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for email authentication.

4. Choose a Cloudflare Plan

Cloudflare will ask you to select a plan. The available options include:

Free — Includes CDN, basic DDoS protection, free SSL, and DNS management. This is what most Ultra Web Hosting clients use and it works great.
Pro — Adds a web application firewall (WAF) with managed rulesets, image optimization, and mobile optimization.
Business — Adds custom SSL certificates, advanced WAF rules, and SLA guarantees.
Enterprise — Custom pricing with dedicated support and advanced features.

For the vast majority of websites hosted with Ultra Web Hosting, the Free plan provides everything you need. You can always upgrade later.

5. Change Your Nameservers

Cloudflare will provide you with two nameservers to use, such as:

ada.ns.cloudflare.com
bob.ns.cloudflare.com

The specific names will be different for your account. You need to update these at your domain registrar (where you purchased your domain — e.g., GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains).

Log into your domain registrar's control panel.
Find the nameserver settings for your domain.
Replace the existing nameservers with the two Cloudflare nameservers provided.
Save the changes.

Important When using Cloudflare, your nameservers point to Cloudflare, not Ultra Web Hosting. This is how Cloudflare works — it needs to be the first point of contact for DNS queries. Cloudflare then uses the A record in its DNS settings to route traffic to your Ultra Web Hosting server. Your hosting account, files, email, and cPanel are unaffected — only the path traffic takes to reach your server changes.

6. Wait for Propagation

Nameserver changes need time to propagate across the internet. This typically takes:

15 minutes to 2 hours in most cases.
Up to 24-48 hours in rare situations, depending on your registrar and DNS caching.

Cloudflare will send you an email once it detects that the nameserver change has propagated and your site is active on their network.

Verifying Cloudflare Is Active

Once propagation is complete, you can verify that Cloudflare is working in several ways:

Cloudflare Dashboard — Your domain's status will change from "Pending Nameserver Update" to "Active" with a green indicator.
Check HTTP Headers — Visit your website and inspect the response headers (using browser developer tools, Network tab). Look for headers like cf-ray, cf-cache-status, and server: cloudflare. The presence of these headers confirms Cloudflare is proxying your traffic.
DNS Lookup — Use tools.ultrawebhosting.com/dns-report to check that your nameservers now show as Cloudflare's nameservers.

If Something Goes Wrong

Tip If your website stops working after switching to Cloudflare, you can temporarily disable Cloudflare's proxy without changing nameservers back. In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to Overview and click Pause Cloudflare on site at the bottom of the page. This makes Cloudflare act as a DNS-only provider (no proxying or caching), which is useful for isolating whether Cloudflare is causing the issue. You can unpause at any time once the problem is resolved.

Common issues after initial setup:

Redirect loops — Usually caused by the SSL mode being set to "Flexible" when your server is already forcing HTTPS. See SSL/TLS Modes to fix this.
Email stopped working — MX records may be missing or incorrectly proxied. See DNS Migration.
Site showing Cloudflare error page — Your A record in Cloudflare may be pointing to the wrong IP address. Verify it matches your Ultra Web Hosting server IP.
SSL certificate errors — Give Cloudflare a few minutes to provision its edge certificate. If using Full (Strict) mode, make sure you have a valid SSL on your hosting account via AutoSSL.

Next Steps

Once Cloudflare is active, we recommend:

Setting your SSL/TLS mode to Full (Strict) — see SSL/TLS Modes.
Reviewing your DNS records to ensure proxied/DNS-only status is correct — see DNS Migration.
Enabling Always Use HTTPS in SSL/TLS → Edge Certificates.
Exploring Cloudflare's caching and performance settings.