Point the domain at Cloudflare
Last entry we built the site on a laptop. It still lived nowhere. A domain you've bought is just a reserved name — before anyone can reach it, the internet has to know which machine to send them to. That's what this step wires up.
A name needs a phone book
When you buy a domain it comes parked on the registrar's nameservers — the phone book that
turns pangaea.id into an actual address. Ours was bought at Hostinger, so out of the box
Hostinger ran that phone book.
We had a fork in the road. We could stay Hostinger-fronted — point a record straight at a Hostinger VPS running nginx and serve from there. Or hand the front door to Cloudflare and let it sit in front of everything. We chose Cloudflare.
Why Cloudflare
A few reasons, in plain terms:
- It's a global network. Point the name at Cloudflare and visitors reach the nearest of hundreds of cities — not one box in one place.
- Changes propagate fast. Edit a DNS record and Cloudflare's network picks it up quickly, so go-live and fixes don't wait on slow updates.
- The safety net is free. A CDN cache, an HTTPS certificate, a DDoS shield and a firewall all come included — things a bare VPS makes you assemble and maintain yourself.
- It keeps the AI crawlers welcome. Our whole GEO bet depends on ChatGPT and Claude being able to read us, and Cloudflare can gate exactly that at the edge. (We made sure to allow them — see below.)
The careful parts
Moving nameservers is low-drama if you respect three trip-wires:
The exact records to carry, the Cloudflare steps, and a dig check to confirm the switch are in
the companion walkthrough Point the domain at Cloudflare (DNS) →.
Then the records themselves: the apex + www go proxied (orange cloud) so they ride
Cloudflare's edge; a placeholder api.pangaea.id stays grey, reserved for a real server later
— the one we didn't use for the website. That's the next entry.
Done
We pasted Cloudflare's two nameservers into Hostinger, waited (propagation can take up to a day;
ours was quick), and pangaea.id started answering from Cloudflare's edge. The front door exists.
Now we had to put a building behind it.
Next: Ship the website — Git → CI/CD → Pages →.
Sources