Built For Designers & Developers

CloudFlare: Direct Website & cPanel Access

This applies only to customers who have changed their nameservers to use CloudFlare. Clients who use our nameservers, or use the ‘CloudFlare’ icon in cPanel/SiteAdmin to manage their CloudFlare preferences are not affected by this.

If you use CloudFlare to accelerate and protect the domain that you and your customers use to access your server for WHM, cPanel and webmail, then you may experience an issue whereby you are asked to log in repeatedly, even when the correct username and password has been supplied. This is due to an interaction between CloudFlare’s distributed way of connecting to shared hosting servers, and WHM’s security mechanisms.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to avoid! By default, CloudFlare enables a subdomain for direct access to the shared hosting server – if your domain is example.com, then the direct access subdomain will be direct.example.com. So, for example, webmail will be accessible at http://direct.example.com/webmail. Alternatively, if you wish to use SSL to connect to services (recommended), you can use the primary hostname for your server, which can be found in Backstage (and was what you specified when you signed up) – as the primary hostname will be on a different domain, it won’t be affected by CloudFlare.

The direct access method can also be used during period of active development as it’s common to need to check the latest versions of scripts or graphics that are undergoing regular updates. In order to do this, the site can be accessed with the root domain, rather than with the www. prefix .

For example : http://yourdomain.com rather than http://www.yourdomain.com.

This way, regular visitors to the site can benefit from CloudFlare’s features, while the developer can avoid the caching layer and always be certain of the latest version of their content. Alternatively you can enable development mode within your CloudFlare interface to bypass its caching features. You can follow our helpful guide on how to complete by clicking this link.