We provide free access to Cloudflare and their Railgun on all of our Web Hosting and Business Building packages. This has been a huge selling point as many other shared web hosts in the industry charge a premium for this feature.
Cloudflare has gained huge popularity over the last decade as they offer a quick and easy way to speed up your website and help protect against DDOS attacks. Their Railgun option, accelerate your website up to 200% and if purchased directly from Cloudflare, you have to have their business package with is $200/month! Being free at Krepling, this is a huge saving!
Unfortunately, Cloudflare can be a bit challenging for some of our customers to integrate with, therefore we try and update this guide each year to show how to do it (as their interface frequently changes).
Setup Partial Integration Inside Of cPanel
To get started, you want to setup a Partial (a/k/a CNAME) Integration inside of cPanel and then access "Cloudflare". Once you click the Cloudflare icon, you’ll be brought to a screen where you need to register for your free Cloudflare account or log in to your existing account:
Create A New Cloudflare Account
If you don’t already have an account with Cloudflare, you’ll need to register one. It’s quick, easy, and free, just click the green "Create Your Free Account" button. This will spawn a new pop-up window where you need to enter your email address and create a password. Once you click Create Account close out the window! That’s all you need to do here!
Login To Cloudflare
Regardless if you just created an account with Cloudflare or you already have one, the next step is to log in to your account from inside of Cloudflare in your cPanel. Once you get logged in you’ll be sent to a dashboard.
You’ll notice there are two different integration methods. You’re going to want to select the first one; "Provision Domain with CNAME Setup". The Full Zone Setup requires you to change your name servers away from Krepling, hence we’re unable to provide support for it. If you choose to go this route you may not have access to their Railgun.
Once you click the "Provision Domain with CNAME Setup "option, it will add your domain to their network. You want to make sure your domain matches these settings.
If you have subdomains or addon domains setup on your account, you may see more DNS records. That’s fine; you just want to make sure you’re using the partial Zone Type and the Use Cloudflare option is green on your domain. Do not change any of these settings!
Allow 24 Hours For DNS Propagation
Since you just made changes to your DNS, you need to allow a full 24 hours for propagation to take place. This is similar to when you first signed up for your web hosting account. It takes time for your ISP to recognize the DNS changes and show that Cloudflare is active on your website.
Once 24 hours has taken place, you can then check your website to ensure Cloudflare is active. It’s important you don’t change ANY Cloudflare settings until you’re sure your website is active.
How To Check Cloudflare On Your Website
Once you’ve enabled Cloudflare and have waited a full 24 hours, you can check your website to ensure it’s active. Since we did a Partial Zone Type Integration it’s important that you use ‘www’ on your website to connect to Cloudflare.
In our example, we setup jimthemonkey.com, therefore we need to make sure we call the website from https://www.jimthemonkey.com. If you’re using WordPress or a similar content management system, this may require you going to "Settings", then to "General" (in wp-admin) and modifying your site URL.
Checking Using The Dig Command
If you’re using a Mac, you can open the Terminal, (go to "Applications", then "Utilities" and then to"Terminal") and run the command:
dig www.yourdomain.com
Make sure to replace yourdomain.com with your website.
How To Enable Cloudflare Railgun
As mentioned above, all of our Web Hosting and Business Building packages come with Cloudflare’s Railgun 100% free of charge. Many of our international customers like this feature as it helps prevent network latency and gives the appearance the website is hosted in a data center next door to the visitor!
If you’ve followed this tutorial exactly as we have mentioned, you can easily enable Railgun by going to cPanel then to "Cloudflare" and selecting the "Railgun" on under Connected to Website.
Depending on the node your website is hosted on the name of the Railgun maybe called something different. That doesn’t change anything as long as you select it to On (if there are multiple Railguns, just select one).
How To Check Cloudflare’s Railgun
Once you enable the Railgun, it’s also a good idea to wait a full 24 hours before checking it. Most of the time it is activated instantly, but I have seen it take a few hours, especially with new accounts.
If Cloudflare’s Railgun is not active after 24 hours, you want to go through this guide again and make sure you’ve followed all the steps exactly.
As mentioned above, if you’re not doing a Partial Zone Type integration, you may run into this issue. Since that requires DNS to be taken away from Krepling, we, unfortunately, do not have access to that backend and cannot guarantee the Railgun will function properly.
Cloudflare Settings
Inside of the cPanel go to "Cloudflare dashboard", and you’ll notice several different settings.
We recommend leaving them all default unless you specifically know what you’re doing. Sometimes even a minor change to these can break your website if you’re not fully aware of how things were coded. This is especially true if you’re using WordPress or another content management system that comes with a custom theme/plugin.
Unfortunately, we’re unable to provide support on custom options as a lot of this is dependent on the actual coding of your website. [Our CEO once broke a website by enabling auto minify on javascript because the script wasn’t coded correctly].
Enabling Cloudflare Development Mode
Since part of Cloudflare’s optimization involves caching your website, you’ll want to make sure to enable their Development mode if you’re making changes to your CSS, Javascript, Theme, etc.
If you don’t the changes made to your website may not show up immediately and this can create a lot of confusion. To enable developer mode, simply go to cPanel then to "Cloudflare", then to "Settings" and select "Development Mode on".
