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Setting up a website to use Cloudflare on a VM hosted on Vultr and Namecheap

March 13, 2018 by Simon

This guide will show how you can set up a website to use Cloudflare on a VM hosted on Vultr and Namecheap

I have a number of guides on moving hasting away form CPanel, Setting up VM’s on AWS, Vultr or Digital Ocean along with installing and managing WordPress from the command line. This post will show how to let Cloudflare handle the DNS for the domain.

Update 2018: For the best performing VM host (UpCloud) read my guide on the awesome UpCloud VM hosts (get $25 free credit by signing up here).

Snip from here “Cloudflare’s enterprise-class web application firewall (WAF) protects your Internet property from common vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and cross-site forgery requests with no changes to your existing infrastructure.”

Buy a Domain 

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Cloudflare Benefits (Free Plan)

  • DDoS Attack Protection (Huge network to absorb attacks DDoS attacks over 600Gbps are no problem for our 15 Tbps networks)
  • Global CDN
  • Shared SSL certificate (I disabled this and opted to use my own)
  • Access to audit logs
  • 3 page rules (maximum)

View paid plan options here.

Cloudflare CDN map

Cloudflare CDN says it can load assets up to 2x faster, 60% less bandwidth from your servers by delivering assets from 127 data centres.

Cloudflare Global Network

Setup

You will need to sign up at cloudflare.com

Cloudflare

After you create an account you will be prompted to add a siteAdd SiteCloudflare will pull your public DNS records to import.

Query DNS

You will be prompted to select a plan (I selected free)

Plan Select

Verify DNS settings to import.

DNS Import

You will now be asked to change your DNS nameservers with your domain reseller

DNS Nameservers

TIP: If you have an SSL cert (e.g Lets Encrypt) already setup head to the crypto section and select ” Full (Strict)” to prevent ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS errors.

Strict SSL

Cloudflare UI

I asked Twitter if they could kindly load my site so I could see if Cloudflare dashboard/stats were loading.

Could I kindly ask if you are reading this that you visit https://t.co/9x5TFARLCt, I am writing a @Cloudflare blog post and need to screenshot stats. Thanks in advance

— Simon Fearby (Developer) (@FearbySoftware) March 13, 2018

The Cloudflare CTO responded.  🙂

Sure thing 🙂

— John Graham-Cumming (@jgrahamc) March 13, 2018

Confirm Cloudflare link to a domain from the OSX Comand line

host -t NS fearby.com
fearby.com name server dane.ns.cloudflare.com.
fearby.com name server nora.ns.cloudflare.com.

Caching Rule

I set up the following caching rule to cache everything for 8 hours instead of WordPress pages

Page Rules

“fearby.com.com/wp-*” Cache level: Bypass

“fearby.com.com/wp-admin/post.php*” Cache level: Bypass

“fearby.com/*” Cache Everything, Edge Cache TTL: 8 Hours

Cache Results

Cache appears to be sitting at 50% after 12 hours.  having cache os dynamic pages out there is ok unless I need to fix a typo, then I need to login to Cloudflare and clear the cache manually (or wait 8 hours)

Performance after a few hours

DNS times in gtmetrix have now fallen to a sub 200ms (Y Slow is now a respectable A, it was a C before).  I just need to wait for caching and minification to kick in.

DNS Improved

webpagetest.org results are awesome

See here: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/180314_PB_7660dfbe65d56b94a60d7a604ca250b3/

  • Load Time: 1.80s
  • First Byte 0.176s
  • Start Render 1.200s

webpagetest

Google Page Speed Insights Report

Mobile: 78/100

Desktop: 87/100

Check with https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Update 24th March 2018 Attacked?

I noticed a spike in and traffic (incoming and threats) on the 24th of March 2018.

I logged into Cloudflare on my mobile device and turned on Under Attack Mode.

Under Attack Flow

Cloudflare was now adding a delay screen in the middle of my initial page load. Read more here.  A few hours after the Attach started it was over.

After the Attack

I looked at the bandwidth and found no increase in traffic from my initial host VM. Nice.

cloudflare-attack-001

Thanks, Cloudflare.

Cloudflare Pros

  • Enabling Attack mode was simple.
  • Soaked up an attack.
  • Free Tier
  • Many Reports
  • Option to force HTTPS over HTTP
  • Option to ban/challenge suspicious IP’s and set challenge timeframes.
  • Ability to setup IP firewall rules and Application Firewalls.
  • User-agent blocking
  • Lockdown URL’s to IP’s (pro feature)
  • Option to minify Javascript, CSS and HTML
  • Option to accelerate mobile links
  • Brotli compression on assets served.
  • Optio to enable BETA Rocket loader for Javascript performance tweaks.
  • Run Javascript service workers from the 120+ CDN’s
  • Page/URL rules o perform custom actions (redirects, skip cache, Encryption etc)
  • HTTP/2 on, IPV6 ON
  • Option to setup load balancing/failover
  • CTO of Cloudflare responded in Twitter 🙂
  • Option to enable rate limiting (charged at 10,000 hits for $0.05c)
  • Option to block countries (pro feature)
  • Option to install apps in Cloudflare like(Goole Analytics,

Cloudflare Cons

  • No more logging into NameCheap to perform DNS management (I now goto Cloudflare, Namecheap are awesome).
  • Cloudflare Support was slow/confusing (I ended up figuring out the redirect problem myself).
  • Some sort of verify Cloudflare Setup/DNS/CDN access would be nice. After I set this up my gtmetrix load times were the same and I was not sure if DNS needs to replicate? Changing minify settings in Cloudflare did not seem to happen.
  • WordPress draft posts are being cached even though page riles block wp-admin page caching.
  • Would be nice to have ad automatic Under Attack mode
  • Now all sub-domains were transferred in the setup ( id did not know for weeks)

Cloudflare status

Check out https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/ for status updates.

Don’t forget to install the CloudFlare Plugin for WordPress if you use WordPress.

More Reading

Check out my OWASP Zap and Kali Linux self-application Penetration testing posts.

I hope this guide helps someone.

Ask a question or recommend an article

[contact-form-7 id=”30″ title=”Ask a Question”]

Revision History

v1.8 host Command from the OSX CLI

v1.7 Subdomain error

v1.6 Cloudflare Attack

v1.5 WordPress Plugin

v1.4 More Reading

v1.3 added WAF snip

v1.2 Added Google Page Speed Insights and webpage rest results

v1.1 Added Y-Slow

v1.0 Initial post

Filed Under: Analytics, App, Cache, CDN, Cloud, Cloudflare, DNS, Domain, Hosting, LetsEncrypt, Marketing, Secure, Security, SEO, Server, VM, Vultr, Website, Wordpress Tagged With: a, and, Cloudflare, hosted, namecheap, on, Setting, to, up, use, vm, vultr, website

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