subdomain www
I have a subdomain of https://fredclick.vihdutta.com on my domain https://vihdutta.com. Both are hosted seperately. Now, https://www.vihdutta.com works, but https://www.fredclick.vihdutta.com doesn't. Any pointers why?
9 Replies
Two reasons:
1 - You don't have a DNS Record for it
2 - It's too deep for the free universal cert (only first level subdomains are covered)
If you created a DNS Record for it (just another 100::, named www.fredclick), it would resolve and work over HTTP but not HTTPS, the default Universal cert you get wouldn't cover it. You'd have to pay for ACM (Advanced Certificate Manager) or use one of the other ways to get a valid certificate that covers it
Ohhh okay I see. But with my page rule couldn't I have it so that it goes to the non-WWW which has the Universal cert?
What do you mean by that? Your Page rule would work, if you had a DNS Record for it (to get traffic flowing through Cloudflare and hit it) and if you had a valid certificate for it (so https would work)
That's why you need the proxied AAAA record (or really any record, the 100:: is just what is recommended), you're basically telling Cloudflare "hey, start responding with your Proxy IPs for this hostname", so that it can flow through Cloudflare and be acted on by a page rule
Ahh I see. Thanks for your help. Just one last thing, is this what I should be doing? I didn't change the page rules but it doesn't seem to work when I go to www.fredclick.vihdutta.com
Right, that's the other half of the problem (and you can see the orange triangle next to the record indictating it).
That does actually work now, but only over HTTP
Cloudflare issues you a SSL/TLS Certificate for free, this is called your "Universal Certificate", and enables you to have https with proxy enabled. However, this free certificate only covers first level subdomains of vihdutta.com, for example fredclick.vihdutta.com is covered, but www.fredclick.vihdutta.com isn't. If you want it to work over https on www.fredclick, you would need another SSL/TLS Certificate. Cloudflare offers ACM (Advanced Certificate Manager), for this purpose, and it would allow you to issue a certificate to cover that. ACM, however, is a paid addon.
For more information: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/subdomain-too-deep/81872
If you don't have a specific reason to need a www.fredclick subdomain, browsers won't go to it automatically or anything like that, so you shouldn't need it.
I'll definitely look into ACM; I don't necessarily need to use the www on that subdomain, but I believe it's best practice to handle the www, correct?
I'm essentially trying to route the www.fredclick.vihdutta.com which doesn't have the Universal Certificate to fredclick.vihdutta.com which does. However, for me, when I go to www.fredclick.vihdutta.com it says it cannot resolve the domain, even though (I believe) my page rules should cover it so that it should go to fredclick.vihdutta.com.
Best practice to handle www on the root of the domain sure, but on subdomains no, shouldn't matter
To clarify, Page rules are not what make it resolve, the DNS Record is what makes it resolve.
What you are seeing is just DNS Cache though, it does exist now, and when your dns cache expires you should see a different error, due to the certificate issue described above
Ohhh okay. At least that makes more sense. Thank you!