Setting up Cloudflare for a Digital Ocean droplet

This is a quick recollection of the steps it took to set up Cloudflare for a website that is using Apache on a DigitalOcean Droplet.

What is a CDN and why do I need one?

If you’ve never heard of a CDN or have but are not sure what it is, here is a small explanation. A CDN is a global network of servers that helps distribute your website content to different places across the globe. Most websites start off on a single server. If you set up your own website, you will usually start with a hosting provider and a domain registrar. At the domain registrar you enter the address  of the hosting provider’s DNS servers and/or IP addresses. Sometimes you can have both services from a single company. This is so that when somebody types www.yourwebsite.com the request is correctly routed to your webserver.

In this setup, every visitor to your website will be served by your single server that you rented from your hosting provider. If your hosting provider is in Texas, and your website visitor is in Tokyo, Japan, it will naturally create a little bit of a delay in the communication that happens behind the scenes. The bigger the website you’re serving, the longer it will take to load everything between Texas and Tokyo. Now if you wanted to speed up the loading times for your Japanese visitors, you could set up another server in or close to Japan. But that would be a lot of work and it wouldn’t help your other visitors who might be in South Africa or in Norway.

A Content Distribution network will sit between your hosting provider and your visitors. Because it is a Network, it’s servers are distributed and it will be able to serve your content to much more places, and much faster than you could by setting up a server in every country. Here is an image that I took from Cloudflare’s website and it explains the setup very well I think.

How does the setup process work?

If you’re running a simple website with some information and pictures on it that are not using a secured connection, it’s fairly easy.

1. Create a cloudflare account
2. Get your new nameservers from cloudflare
3. Enter your nameservers in your domain registrar‘s administration panel.
4. Log in to cloudflare and set up your domains and subdomains
5. Be sure you recreated all the DNS entries from your old domain registrar. For example, if you are using Google Apps for work, you also have to set up your MX records in your cloudflare account.

What if I use a secure connection over HTTPS?

This was the case for the site I was moving. Cloudflare has a couple of options in their management. They are mostly concerning what certificate to use (cloudflare vs. your own) and what part of the connection should be encrypted with with certificate. Because there are two parts in the connection.

User <-ssl-> Cloudflare <-ssl-> Your Server

Time required to issue a new certificate

If you are using the option Full or Full (strict), Cloudflare will require some time to issue a new certificate. In our case, for the first 24 hours, our website was showing the scary “Your connection is not private” message in all browsers. During that time, the SSL settings in the Cloudflare management screen were saying “Issuing new certificate” or something similar. It was eventually resolved automatically, but this is a very important factor if you’re migrating a website in production.