Cloudflare offers an amazing free service that speeds up your website and helps to protect against hacker attacks.  You can sign up for the service directly on the CloudFlare website, or you can use your Arvixe cpanel login to register for the service.

What you need to know, thanks to Karen S. the resident DNS Master Guru at Arvixe support, is that you should either use the Cloudflare control panel, or your Arvixe cpanel to make DNS changes but not both.  Here’s how it works:

When you sign up for Cloudflare on the Cloudflare website, the system scans your existing DNS records, (which are hosted here at Arvixe) then populates the Cloudflare DNS database with your domain information. Once the scan is complete, Cloudflare asks you to update the DNS servers for your domain from Arvixe DNS servers, to point to Cloudflare DNS servers.

From this point forward, Cloudflare is effectively inserting itself between your website at Arvixe and the rest of the world.  Anyone who types in your website URL in a browser will get redirected to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare will tell the browser how to reach your website. That’s how Cloudflare does its magic. It can filter and redirect traffic across its own internal network in order to optimize good traffic and block bad traffic.

However if you sign up for Cloudflare via the Arvixe cpanel control panel icon Arvixe will continue to serve as your primary DNS, and route your website traffic back to Cloudflare.

That’s quite a difference. What it means is that if you need to change your website DNS records, for example, to set up a CNAME alias for an existing domain, or add an A record for a new domain, then you need to know where to make the changes because if you point your website directly to Cloudflare’s DNS servers, then any changes you make to your DNS records using the Arvixe control panel will be ignored!  

I recently ran into this issue, while setting up a subdomain which was hosted on an Arvixe server.  I forgot that I had already set up a Cloudflare account to handle my website DNS.  You can imagine my dismay when I got a “Page Not Found” error after typing my URL into a browser.  The first thing I checked was the Arvixe cpanel under Simple DNS Zone Editor where everything seemed fine.  Of course, since Cloudflare was now in charge of routing my traffic, it was an easy fix to use the Cloudflare control panel to add the right DNS entries.

Hope you this saves you some time!

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