The Cloudflare network
Understand zones, DNS, and proxy status
See how a Cloudflare zone becomes authoritative for a domain and what changes when a record is proxied.
8 minute lesson
A zone is the part of DNS Cloudflare manages for a domain. In a full setup, you point the domain’s nameservers at Cloudflare, then maintain its DNS records there.
A DNS-only record returns the origin address. A proxied record returns Cloudflare anycast addresses, so supported HTTP and HTTPS traffic reaches Cloudflare first. Proxy status changes the traffic path; it does not move your origin or application data by itself.
Use a practice domain or subdomain. Inspect one DNS-only record and one proxied record with dig, then draw both request paths.
Compare the public answers before and after proxying a practice record:
dig +short app.example.com A
curl -I https://app.example.comRun both commands while the record is DNS-only, then repeat after the proxy change has propagated. Save the returned addresses and response headers. The exercise should prove the path changed; it should not assume every Cloudflare header or IP remains constant forever.
Lesson completed