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Nameservers, DNS and CloudFlare

Nameservers respond to DNS queries for your domain, essentially telling the browser where to find your website. For web hosting, Cloudey operates 2 nameservers, one located in Germany and the other in Finland, to provide especially low latency in both Western and Eastern Europe.

If you are using your own domain for hosting (you selected "I will use my own domain" at checkout) or you would like to add an addon domain to your account, you will need to update the nameservers for your domain at the domain registrar. The domain registrar is usually where you bought the domain from.

If you are using CloudFlare or another third party DNS provider, skip to Using CloudFlare. You should not change your nameservers in this case.

To see an overview of the current active DNS records for your domain, use DNSy.

Updating the nameservers

To change the nameservers for your domain, log in to your registrar's control panel. The process for changing nameservers differs slightly for every registrar, but generally you should look for "Nameservers" or "DNS servers". You may need to select "I want to use my own nameservers" or a similar option.

Cloudey's nameservers are:

ns1.cloudey.net
ns2.cloudey.net

Some registrars require specifying the nameserver IPs:

ns1.cloudey.net: 159.69.29.198
ns2.cloudey.net: 95.216.151.238

Once you have made the necessary changes and applied them, the changes need to propagate across the world's DNS servers. This process may take anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours, depending on the registrar. If your site does not resolve correctly after updating the nameservers, it's very likely due to DNS propagation not being complete. In that case, all you can do is sit back and wait for the changes to take effect.

Once the changes have taken effect, you might see a 403 error (if you haven't added any content to your website) or your website (if you have) when visiting the domain. Don't worry about the 403 error - once you add content to your website, it will disappear! You can access your hosting control panel (cPanel) by navigating to yourdomain.com/cpanel or cpanel.yourdomain.com.

Congratulations! You are now in business!

If you run into any issues while updating your nameservers, feel free to open a support ticket! We can't help with registrar-specific issues, but we can usually point you in the right direction.

Using CloudFlare

CloudFlare is one of the largest DNS and CDN providers in the world, offering services such as DNS, CDN, DDoS protection, edge workers, domain registration, and others. They have a compelling set of features available for free, so we recommend checking them out.

If your domain's DNS provider is CloudFlare, the process of pointing your domain towards our servers is slightly different. Since you cannot and should not change your nameservers, you will need to manually add the necessary DNS records at CloudFlare.

First, take note of the server IP your hosting account has been provisioned to. This is specified in the welcome e-mail you receive after placing your order, titled "Your Hosting Account Information for Cloudey". If you haven't received it, make sure it didn't end up in your spam folder. The server IP is listed in the e-mail under the heading Server Information. If you are not sure where to find the IP, please open a support ticket, and we'll help you out!

To create the records, go to CloudFlare's control panel and open the DNS tab for your domain.

You need to create the following records:

Type Name Record / Domain name TTL
A @ server IP from welcome e-mail Automatic
CNAME www @ Automatic
MX @ Priority: 0 Destination: @ Automatic
TXT @ v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:server IP from welcome e-mail +include:relay.mailchannels.net ~all Automatic
CNAME mail @ Automatic
CNAME ftp @ Automatic
CNAME cpanel @ Automatic
CNAME webmail @ Automatic
CNAME autoconfig @ Automatic
CNAME autodiscover @ Automatic
CNAME webdisk @ Automatic

Replace server IP from welcome e-mail with the IP you discovered in the previous steps.

In Cloudflare, @ signifies the root domain (e.g. example.com). This shorthand may not be supported by other DNS providers. In that case, simply use the domain name (e.g. example.com) in place of @.

Make sure to turn off CloudFlare HTTP proxy (change the orange cloud to grey cloud) for the records: mail, ftp, cpanel, autoconfig, autodiscover and webdisk. CloudFlare's HTTP proxy interferes with the functioning of these services.

To improve e-mail deliverability, it is also strongly recommended to create DKIM records. These are unique for each domain. You can look up the value of this record from the hosting control panel (cPanel), under the Domains section: Zone Editor -> Manage (next to your domain). Find the TXT record "default._domainkey.YOURDOMAIN.COM", and create an identical one in CloudFlare with the same value as the one in Zone Editor.

If you are encountering issues with the provisioning of SSL certificates, make sure CloudFlare's SSL setting is set to off for your domain or disable CloudFlare's HTTP proxy (change the orange cloud to grey cloud) for the record that is having issues with SSL.

After that's done, the changes should take effect almost immediately, but may take up to an hour in some cases.

Once the changes have taken effect, you will see a blank directory listing (if you haven't added any content to your website) or your website (if you have) when visiting the domain. You can access your hosting control panel (cPanel) by navigating to yourdomain.com/cpanel or cpanel.yourdomain.com.

Congratulations! You did it!

IMPORTANT: If you create subdomains for your domain in cPanel, you need to manually add them in CloudFlare as CNAME records pointing to your root domain, similar to the www record. Otherwise, the subdomains will not resolve.

If you run into any issues while setting up CloudFlare, feel free to open a support ticket! We can't help with CloudFlare-specific issues, but we can usually point you in the right direction.

Using a 3rd party DNS provider (Google DNS, Route53, etc.)

We cannot provide specific instructions for every single third party DNS provider, for obvious reasons. In general, you will need to create exactly the same records as specified in the section for using CloudFlare. You may need to substitute the @ in the records for your top-level domain name (e.g. example.com), as not all DNS providers offer this shorthand. If you run into any issues setting up a 3rd party DNS provider, we recommend contacting them directly, as they can offer more specific advice about their systems.

Check your DNS records

You can check your domain DNS records using our free DNS lookup tool DNSy.