I think we all know that Cloudflare allows you to use CNAMES on your apex domain, i.e. techarticles.co.uk in this case, but one thing a lot of people don’t realise is you can nest these.
Except for GridPane generated sites and the few sites where I use the provider DNS because that’s what it’s for, i.e. WPDEMOSITE.co.uk, a quick site to launch a site using their tools. I utilise Cloudflare for everything.
One of my hosting providers myw.pt has put out some information today about unavoidable IP change. The reasoning is sound, and Jarland did us all a favour months ago; if you don’t know, he runs MXroute, and this is one of my recommended email hosts.
Due to the nature of this and the allocation of the new IP, it’s not known exactly when it will happen, and it is also not known what the new IP will be, so it would be difficult for me to automate that change using a DNS resolver and an automation script, as I would have to keep pooling the sever CNAME to know when this happened say every 5 minutes, this seemed like a lot of work.
Now, how I’ve been using all my servers and hosting providers is using a CNAME points to an IP, and I use the CNAME at the domain to point to the server i.e domain.com would point to server.myotherdomain.com which points to 192.192.192.192
Now, as I know, they will update the hostname’s IP (they tell you to poll this in the email to know what and when the change is made for speed, which is a great idea).
This Cloudflare Article & This Gridpane Article have some good details about flattening, but I had an idea and it involved flattening could I just add an extra jump to my CNAME flattening with Cloudflare the answer was yes you can.
The above subdomain is actually exactly the subdomain to the CNAME to the Hosts CNAME, behind Cloudflare proxy, with no issues at all, it makes a milliseconds difference to load time, and its only temporary until I know the IP when I will shift it back to an IP address and all will be right with the world.
Now, when the changes happen when they update the hostname, my CNAME has a 2min ttl, and I can now just check in the next day and just update to the new IP address without having to worry downtime will be limited to as long as it takes the host to update their own domain name.
This is the advantage of an excellent update strategy. I’ve had a good bit of notice; I was already using CNAME flattening, and I had to change a single record for this to work, which took seconds; if you’re going to have to update ALL your domains, why not put this strategy in place? The Gridpane article above is an excellent start and explainer for this, A single record has updated ALL my hosted sites.
For those who prefer videos, this video by Jonathan Jerigan would be a good watch, too https://youtu.be/QSFvpXQiacw?feature=shared
Update: Well, the transition happened, and this solution worked perfectly. I had Zero reported downtime. The host was so quick to update their own hostname nothing was recorded by better time in a 5-minute check. I’ve removed the testing URL from the article but have left it here for future information
