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CloudFlare has partnered with a number of CloudFlare Certified Partners such as DreamHost to make it simple for website owners that want a faster and safer website. Since signing up for CloudFlare through a hosting partner is different than signing up for CloudFlare directly, we wanted to provide some quick tips to help you get the most out of your CloudFlare experience.

You do not need to change your name servers when activating through a hosting partner. You would still manage your DNS entries at your hosting provider or registrar.

CloudFlare can only be enabled for CNAME records when activating through a hosting partner. To enable CloudFlare on your root domain (yourdomain.com), which is an A record, you need to have your hosting partner set a 301 redirect from your root domain to www. Not only will the redirect help accelerate and protect the root domain, this will also make the CloudFlare statistics in your CloudFlare account accurate.

Note: If you have a naked domain, 'yourdomain.com', and you don't want your visitors to go to 'www.yourdomain.com', then you need to signup directly with CloudFlare.

What you should do if you see any of the following error messages after enabling CloudFlare:

• “Host Not Configured to Serve Web Traffic” error message will appear on the first request to your site after activating through a partner, then will go away after a few minutes. If it lasts for more than 10 minutes,

then contact your hosting provider and our support teams will work together to resolve.

• “CloudFlare-nginx 502 Bad Gateway”: This is an issue on the CloudFlare network. We deal with these quickly (less than 10 minutes). We publish all announcements regarding our network status on @CloudFlareSys.

• “Website is Unavailable”: Either your web server is offline and we don't have a copy of your site in Cloudflare cache or something on the origin server is blocking CloudFlare's IPs.

If your web server is online, then work with your hosting provider to find out what could be blocking CloudFlare's IPs on your server. The most common culprit is a security solution like a firewall like CSF or IP tables. As soon as the block is removed, the error page will disappear.

• SSL - If you have SSL on the domain(s), you will need to upgrade to a Pro account. The cost for a Pro account is $20.00 per month for the first website and $5.00 for each additional site. In addition to the SSL support, you will also receive additional security and performance benefits.

Note: You will find the option to upgrade to Pro in your CloudFlare account.

If you are making changes to the static content on your website, temporarily bypass CloudFlare's cache so any changes appear immediately. You can find CloudFlare Development Mode either right in your hosting provider's control panel or by logging in to your CloudFlare account under CloudFlare Settings.

PageRules gives you more powerful website performance and configuration options, including: Advanced Caching Configurations

Excluding URLS from CloudFlare's default caching and security options Setting URL forwards and redirects

CloudFlare has developed web content optimization features called CloudFlare Rocket Loader and Cloud Flare Auto Minify. Both Rocket Loader and Auto Minify are designed to load your site's resources even faster than the default CloudFlare configuration.

Rocket Loader will speed up the delivery of your pages by automatically asynchronously loading your JavaScript resources. Rocket Loader works well for websites that have a lot of ads, widgets or plugins.

Auto Minify (see also minify) removes all unnecessary characters from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to reduce web file size.

To turn on Rocket Loader and Auto Minify, you need to log in to your CloudFlare account and go to CloudFlare Settings.

Make your website IPv6 compatible, by turning on the CloudFlare IPv6 gateway.

Fair Use Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-tips-recommended-steps-after-activ