Setting up a new domain in Cloudflare

Cloudflare being on the biggest entities in the internet, provide various services to customers. One among them is managing DNS for domains. Before we move ahead with setting up new domain, you should own a domain. There are many options to choose a domain registrar and get a domain. Few notables ones are Namecheap, Porkbun, Cloudflare etc.

Moving a domain from a registrar to Cloudflare has few advantages.

1. Cloudflare is one of the fastest DNS provider in the world, meaning your DNS queries would get propagates around the world at rocket speed.
2. Cloudflare provides various tools such as WAF, SSL/TLS handling, Email Security, Caching and much more.

So, if you have decided to move your domain to Cloudflare, lets start.

1. Login to Cloudflare dashboard
2. Once logged in, on the Websites panel, Click on 'Add a site' option
3. Enter your domain name in the next prompt. Click Continue

4. Choose a Cloudflare plan in the next step. If you are unsure or want to try Cloudflare, choose the Free plan.

5. Once you click Continue, Cloudflare will do a quick scan for existing DNS records for your domain. It will take about 1/2 mins.
6. Once done, it will give you option to whether to import all existing records or start from scratch. It also provides an option to upload DNS file

7. After you click 'Continue', you would be taken to a new page where you would be asked to 'Change Name-servers' for your domain.

8. As you can see from above screenshot, Cloudflare has given instructions on how to do it. To simplify it, you would need to login to the registrar where you bought domain and in DNS settings, you need to change the name servers to the ones mentioned in above page. (Disabling DNSSec or migration options are given in Step 2 for smooth migration to Cloudflare)
9. Once name servers are updated, it takes time to update all records globally. Normally this would take 4-5 hours, but if your registrar's DNS is fast, it would be populated globally very fast.
10. As an alternative, you can manually initiate a check from the 'Check nameservers now' button at the bottom of the screen.
11. As soon as nameservers are updated, your domain is now setup in Cloudflare and ready to use.