"Invalid Nameservers" error on delegated zone
I have a domain where the apex is managed by another team but we have delegated a subdomain of a zone to cloudflare for my team and everything is working in terms of being able to manage records for the subdomain within Cloudflare, except in the Cloudflare dashboard the domain status shows as "Invalid Nameservers". According to the dashboard this error is because the nameservers of the apex still point to the other platform and Cloudflare is trying to do a "Full setup" (whatever that means), however I'm not sure I want to do this "Full setup" and instead just want to manage a the subdomain dns records with Cloudflare.
12 Replies
If you have Enterprise you can make a partial/subdomain zone delegated with nameservers
Business plan can do partial zones with CNAMEs rather then Nameserver Delegation
Otherwise free/not on those plans, you won't be able to proxy/etc with adding the full domain, and accidentally it will be deleted for not being setup
yeah I don't care about proxying
I just want to manage DNS records via CF
this is really a bizarre situation as in terms of DNS the setup is a completely valid way to do things
yet we have to pay $200 a month to manage a few records on a subdomain or else have the zone automatically deleted for not wanting any of the 'upgrade' features
the records we have added resolve completely fine - because it's a correct and valid DNS setup - so I'm not sure why CF would regard this zone as not being setup
$200 a month would get you only business, which would just let you do CNAME setup, and CF restricts your record types on those zones to a/aaaa/cname (it's meant only for proxying), so not really a solution
lol that's crazy so it's <insert unspecified amount> over $2400 a year to manage a delegated subdomain via cloudflare
Cloudflare's normal free plan requires control over the entire domain/zone. It only "works" for now because, for the sake of people migrating/transitition, your assigned nameservers will return unproxied records even without verifying the nameservers
yeah as I mentioned previously, we don't really care for proxying for these records anyway so that isn't an issue. This is basic DNS delegation and somehow CF has partially paywalled it
just not aligned with simple dns stuff, Cloudflare wants you to use other features/the cdn more
yeah that's kinda disappointing
If your zone is pending you have 28 days to switch over, "Moved" is 7 days
we manage all the rest of our domains via CF and so we thought it'd be more convenient to manage this additional subdomain there as well because the apex is owned by another team who use another dns provider (due to internal political stuff)
I guess our team will either be using two dns providers then, or maybe just move all our stuff off CF altogether for the sake of simplicity, which is a shame as I personally like CF (minus this weird upsell attempt by them) but this is a kinda ridiculous constraint to prevent a completely valid DNS use case cos no way I'm gonna get an enterprise plan approved just for this subdomain
yea there's lots of cheap providers out there if you just need basic dns. Cloudflare on free plan just wants to push you into using everything else/doesn't want to be a simple dns provider, is the way I see it.
yeah seems so
thanks for your help anyway, thought I was going mad or not seeing some obvious button/toggle to fix this