The next screen you will see in CloudFlare is that it will ask you to set the nameservers for your domain name inside your account with your domain registrar. If you followed the steps in this tutorial, we would be referencing Namecheap when referring to the Domain Registrar.
On this page you will see what it asks you to use when adding the details for your nameservers.
As you can see in the screenshot above, this domain we are using for this tutorial has nameservers set and yours most likely will not but you can see under Step 4 of their requirements, those are the two CloudFlare nameservers that need to be added inside our account with the domain registrar.
So let’s go and do that now.
Log back in to your domain registrar account (namecheap if you followed this tutorial) and go to manage your domains by clicking the Domain List option on the left menu or if you don’t see that, across the top of the website you will see a black bar, and on the left side will be your username for the site, hover over that and in the drop down that appears, choose Dashboard.
You can then choose Domain List from the left menu.
Then select to Manage the domain you’ve just acquired using the option on the right side (grey button).
You will then see a screen similar to the below.
Notice in this image we’ve added 4 red boxes to the image as these are the areas of important we need to look for.
The first red box on the left side shows the section for Nameservers so with this showing we are in the right place.
The two boxes in the center are where we now need to bring our attention.
Where it says Custom DNS in our screenshot, this may say something different for you like Basic DNS. You can click this option and then you’ll need to change it to Custom DNS.
When you do this you’ll see the two lines appear underneath.
This is where you need to add in your nameservers provided to you by CloudFlare.
So copy and paste those nameservers you are given on CloudFlare into these two boxes, with one nameserver per line.
We then need to click the green tick option shown in the red box on the right hand side to save these changes.
DNS updates like this can take up to 48 hours to take effect but are more often than not much quicker, typically resolving within a couple of hours.
Once you’ve set these, you can go back to the CloudFlare screen and click the blue button to proceed.
If these records cannot be verified immediately (because it can take up to 48 hours to take effect), CloudFlare will e-mail you on the e-mail address you supplied to let you know when these are verified.
The next item you see will be CloudFlares quick start guide as shown in the image below.
There is nothing we need to do here, so we can click the Finish Later link seen under the Get Started button.
When your account details have been updated and the nameserver change is live (and you’ve had the e-mail to confirm) the next time you log in to your CloudFlare account you will see the following.
As you can see under the domain name in the box, there is a green check mark and the word Active.
This means CloudFlare now controls the DNS options panel and we can proceed to the next step below.