What Cloudflare's free plan alerts you about, and what you check yourself
We broke a hostname for forty minutes with Cloudflare's free outage alert switched on, and it stayed silent. What Free watches, and a Worker that checks redirects.
The .com price rises on 1 November. Lock today's for up to ten years
Verisign lifts the .com wholesale price from $10.26 to $10.97 on 1 November, the first of up to four steps. The registry contract lets you renew at today's price.
The zone limit your API token hits and your Global API Key does not
Cloudflare documents a fifty domain threshold before pending zones block new ones. A scoped token hits it on the second domain. How to check, and the way around it.
Your redirect rule says Active and nothing happens
Active means the rule was saved, not that a request ever reached it. Four questions that find the reason, each answered by one request. Measured live.
Every job your VPS does, and what Cloudflare's free plan does with it
Moving off a VPS feels like a leap of faith. Task by task — site, TLS, DNS, redirects, cron, mail, storage, small APIs — what the free plan covers and where it bites.
Auto-renew was on and the domain expired anyway
Auto-renew is a standing instruction, not a safety net: it fails on a dead card, a lost renewal email, or a domain you forgot. What actually catches an expiry.
Your redirect is configured and still returns 522, 525, or a parking page
The zone is green and the rule is there, yet visitors get an error or the wrong page. Three ways a Cloudflare redirect quietly fails, and one curl to tell them apart.
Which of your 300 domains still redirect? One script, and what to fix first
The dashboard has no cross-domain view. One script says which of 300 domains still answer, and Ahrefs' now-free DR endpoint says which ones are worth fixing.
A runbook for pointing 200 parked domains at one site
Every domain is its own zone, Cloudflare throttles how fast you can add them, and presetting nameservers gets you the wrong pair. The order that works.