Understanding the grey cloud in your Cloudflare dashboard

IMPORTANT: cPanel no longer supports Cloudflare, and because of that, neither does HostPapa. If you wish to enable Cloudflare, please follow the steps in our Knowledge Base article How to enable Cloudflare on your domain.

In this article, we’ll be talking about the grey cloud in Cloudflare. Subdomains that have been Cloudflare-enabled are marked with an orange cloud. Subdomains that are not Cloudflare-enabled are marked with a grey cloud. This means they will pass through the Cloudflare system and benefit from all its advantages.

Only A and CNAME records have the option to be powered by Cloudflare, meaning that only A and CNAME records may show an orange cloud. However, not all A and CNAME records are appropriate to pass through the Cloudflare system. Cloudflare makes suggestions for which records should be orange, but you can easily change this by clicking on the cloud.

To decide which records pass through the Cloudflare network, you need to understand what type of content appears on that subdomain.

You should enable Cloudflare for any subdomain that gets web traffic. You should not enable Cloudflare for subdomains that handle non-web traffic, such as mail, ftp, and ssh. A grey cloud should mark these types of records.

Note: If you have purchased Protection Power, SiteLock Perform, or SiteLock Shield, DO NOT enable Cloudflare because it will conflict with the Content Delivery Network (CDN) included in your SiteLock or Protection Power package.

Log into your Cloudflare dashboard and go to Your Websites > Settings > DNS Settings to view Cloudflare’s protection options.

Common records that should have a grey cloud (in alphabetical order):

calendar

cpanel

cvs

dev

direct

email

exchange

feed

feeds

ftp

ghs.google.com

git

google

host

imap

irc

jabber.tcp

local

localhost

mail

mobilemail

mx

ns1

ns2

panel

pda

pop

repo

secure

sftp

sites

smtp

sql

ssh

ssl

svn

video

webmail

webstats

If you need help with your HostPapa account, please open a support ticket from your dashboard.

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