For this walkthrough, the domain we are setting up is KickoffLabsFlare.com.
First, we need to login to the KickoffLabs dashboard and add a domain to our account. All KickoffLabs domains must be subdomains, so we are going to add www.kickofflabsflare.com.
Now, within CloudFlare, you will need to enter 2 CNAME records. Please note, there are different options required for each of them.
CNAME 1: Our primary landing page domain – www.kickofflabsflare.com
We need to have the following settings:
- Type = CNAME
- Name = www
- Target = yourcustomvalue.kolcname.com
- TTL = auto
- Proxy Status = DNS Only
The last item, “Proxy Status” is essential. For your domain to work on KickoffLabs, you need to disable the CloudFlare proxy feature (and it cannot be later enabled).
CNAME 2: If you want your root-level domain (kickofflabsflare.com) to redirect your landing page, you will need to add one additional CNAME:
- Type = CNAME
- Name = @
- Target = yourcustomvalue.kolcname.com
- TTL = auto
- Proxy Status = Proxied
These are the same settings we entered previously except for Name we entered “@“ and this time we leave the proxy feature enabled
This domain will not host your page. Instead, we will create a redirect so that anyone who manually enters our root level domain finds their way to our landing page.
You may notice two icons next to your CNAME records. These are expected and highlight you are using CNAME flattening (see below) and that one of your records is not being proxied.
For this to fully work, we have one more step; CloudFlare page rules.
CloudFlare’s page rules are a powerful way to customize your DNS further. In our case, we will use it to redirect any traffic from our root domain (the second record you added above) to our primary domain.
Just enter the following data (but use your domain) into the page rule form.
The critical part here is the “*” after the initial domain. Here we are telling CloudFlare at all requests to this root domain should be redirected.
Some notes about CloudFlare:
- The redirect above will technically work without the second CNAME. However, the benefit of adding the second CNAME is it will work with SSL (https://) as well.
- The second CNAME cannot point to anywhere and can technically be any record. We need to tell CloudFlare there should be a proxied record that will cause CloudFlare to generate an SSL certificate for us. We recommend pointing it at KickoffLabs so that it is consistent.
- You may be thinking, “I thought we were not supposed to use CNAMEs on root level domains”. You are correct. This is still generally not something you want to do. However, CloudFlare has a specific feature called “CNAME flattening” that allows you to use a CNAME the same way you would traditional using an IP address.