Cloudflare CDN – How to Use Without Changing Nameservers on WIX

apache-2.4cdncloudflaredomain-name-system

We have a website on WIX (www.example.com). The domain name and name servers are all on WIX. Using the same domain name we have another website (buy.example.com) which is NOT on WIX. The "A record" of both "WWW" and "BUY" are set on WIX's DNS. Recently we would like to change the name server to Cloudflare(CF) but found that it is not supported. The question is what we can do to utilize the advantages of CF on buy.example.com?

One method come to my mind is to, upon users visiting buy.example.com, redirect immediately the link to buy.example2.com, which uses CF's DNS. The redirection might be done via PHP or Apache settings on the server where the site buy.example.com physically is.

Would this be a feasible workaround that can achieve the goal of using CDN and other CF's features?

Could you please provide us with some clues?

Best Answer

I'm not quite sure if WIX will support this, but technically what you're trying to achieve is to delegate the subdomain zone buy.example.com. to Cloudflare, while keeping your root zone example.com. on WIX.

This seems to be supported by Cloudflare but requires you to a) pay for a business account and b) create the root zone in Cloudflare and then contacting CF Support, so it seems to be a bit of a workaround from CF's side.

Another option is to completely migrate your DNS services to Cloudflare, and then use something WIX calls "pointing" to set up the DNS records in Cloudflare to WIX. This is a lot cleaner approach, and also has the added benefit of being free. Then you can manage all you DNS settings in Cloudflare, which I would imagine does DNS a lot better than WIX.

Related Solutions

Resolving CloudFlare DNS related mail delivery problems

First, thanks a lot for using your actual hostname and information in the question, it helps a lot!

The 451 DNS temporary failure means that the recipient mail server is unable to resolve the hostname at that point in time. I've looked at your DNS records and I can't see anything strange about them that would cause this, so I'd say that the problem is with the CloudFlare DNS servers. It may be that there is some firewall or rate limiting or some other issue that means they either don't respond or don't respond quickly enough for the mail servers to get the information they want in order to accept the emails.

You can contact the postmaster at the recipient site (in theory, the address "postmaster@theirdomain.com" should both work and be read by a human being, but we all know the difference between theory and practice!) and ask them if they can see why the checks failed. I'd also check with the CloudFlare support staff if they've seen the same problems for other customers.

Apache: Redirect everything from www to non-www using https only (including HSTS)

It's weird. Yesterday I created new certs and it still worked. Today:

Chrome (mobile): http://mydomain.tld redirects correct to https://mydomain.tld
Firefox (desktop): http://mydomain.tld doesn't redirect and results in Apache-page
Firefox (mobile) which never was on my website: Same as Firefox (desktop)
Safari (mobile) which never was on my website: Same as Firefox (desktop)

So, it seems there is still a problem. Would be great to get help to solve this finally.

Solution for this problem:

$ sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf
Remove the stuff below in mydomain.tld.conf:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/%$1 [R,L] RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,QSA,R=permanent]

Just use: Redirect permanent / https://mydomain.tld

$sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Final files

mydomain.tld.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerName mydomain.tld
ServerAlias www.mydomain.tld
ServerAdmin contact@mydomain.tld
DocumentRoot /var/www/mydomain.tld/public_html
Redirect permanent / https://mydomain.tld

<Directory /var/www/mydomain.tld/public_html>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride all
Require all granted
</Directory>

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

mydomain.tld-le-ssl.conf

LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
<VirtualHost *:443>
Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000; includeSubdomain$

ServerName mydomain.tld
ServerAlias www.mydomain.tld
ServerAdmin contact@nmydomain.tld
DocumentRoot /var/www/mydomain.tld/public_html

<Directory /var/www/mydomain.tld/public_html>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride all
Require all granted

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^\w+$ index.php?page=$0 [L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} index\.php
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=(\w+)$
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /%1? [R=301,L]

</Directory>

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

RewriteEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.tld/fullchain.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.tld/privkey.pem
Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
</VirtualHost>
</IfModule>