Documentation
Migrating A Cloudflare Proxied Domain
When migrating a domain to Servd which is already using Cloudflare as a proxy, the setup process for Primary Domain verification is a little different.
Regular TXT DNS record ownership pre-verification does not work in this circumstance, but there are two alternatives that can be used.
Option 1. Temporarily Disable Cloudflare Proxying #
The first method is to simply disable Cloudflare proxying within your Cloudflare account for any A or CNAME DNS records for your primary domain. Only records that are an exact match against your registered primary domain need to have proxying disabled.
For example, if you have registered *.mydomain.com as a Primary Domain in Servd, only A and CNAME records for mydomain.com need to have proxying disabled. Any subdomains (or parent domains if you are registering a subdomain with us) can be left as-is.
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Visit the DNS page for the domain within your Cloudflare account
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Disable Cloudflare proxying for any A or CNAME records which are an exact match against thePrimary Domain you're created in Servd. To do this, ensure the 'Proxy Status' column reads 'DNS Only' and shows a grey cloud.
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Wait a couple of minutes for the DNS change to roll out
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In the Servd dashboard, click the refresh button next to the Primary Domain you are working on
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Servd should now have detected that the domain is no longer proxying via Cloudflare and you can perform regular TXT based pre-verification as detailed when clicking the 'Ownership Pending' button.
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Once the domain has been fully migrated to Servd, you are free to re-enable Cloudflare proxying.
Do not re-enable Cloudflare proxying on the adjusted records until you have fully migrated the domain over to Servd by updating the domain's A/CNAME records to point to our platform. Doing so prematurely will revert the ownership verification.
Option 2. Skip Ownership Pre-verification #
In some circumstances it isn't feasible to disable proxying, even temporarily, such as when you are using Cloudflare's Workers or relying on their injected request headers.
In this case ownership pre-verification is not possible, but can be skipped by simply updating the domain's A or CNAME records to point to Servd as per the DNS update instructions. This will also start sending traffic for the domain to our platform.
When this change is made there will be a few moments while after the record is updated, but before the domain ownership has been verified. During this time Cloudflare will display the following error page for traffic reaching the domain:
This error page will be removed automatically once the domain ownership has been confirmed, normally within 60 seconds.
When using this method it is very important that your DNS records within Cloudflare match one of the two options provided within our dashboard exactly. Using a CNAME which does not match, but eventually resolves to one of our supplied values will not work and the above 1000 error will continue to display.
Using a Subdomain of a Primary Domain Without Pre-verification #
If you need to point a subdomain of a Primary Domain towards Servd, but cannot use the verification methods listed above, you can simply add the subdomain as your Primary Domain temporarily. Once you are ready to migrate the parent domain over to Servd, simply delete the subdomain and add in the parent domain.
E.G if the domain mydomain.com is pointing to another hosting provider and you're migrating it to Servd, but you'd like to point preview.mydomain.com to Servd in advance, simply add preview.mydomain.com as a Primary Domain temporarily. Once you're ready to migrate mydomain.com to point to Servd, simply delete the preview.mydomain.com Primary Domain and add in mydomain.com, following one of the verification methods above.