Cloudflare

1. Learn it

• ▸DNS is a phone book. Your address is the name; a record says which machine answers for it.
• ▸You mostly meet three kinds: A (points at a server), CNAME (points at another name), TXT (proves you own it).
• ▸Changes are not instant — they spread. Give it up to an hour before you panic, sometimes longer.
• ▸Cloudflare also sits in front of your site: it caches pages so they load faster and absorbs attack traffic.
• ▸Workers let you run small bits of code at the edge, close to the visitor — the same idea as your host's serverless functions.
• ▸Email needs its own records (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) or your messages land in spam. That's DNS too.

Cost: Free for DNS, CDN and a generous Workers tier.

Read a DNS table before you edit one

Given a record 'A @ 185.158.133.1' and a record 'CNAME www yoursite.example.com', write what each one does in one sentence, and what breaks if you delete the second.

1. 1Create a free Cloudflare account and add your domain.
2. 2Change the nameservers at your registrar to the two Cloudflare gives you.
3. 3Add the records your host asks for, exactly as written, and wait for them to spread.
4. 4Check with a DNS lookup tool before you assume it's broken.

MessyDev never signs you up, spends your money, or touches your accounts. You do that part.

4. Use it

The day you connect a real domain to a real site, and every time email or a subdomain misbehaves.