Need Help: Domain Mapping and SSL Issues with Ghost Pro and Cloudflare

Using Ghost
1

Hello everyone,

This is my first post, and I am new to Ghost Pro, so bear with me. :)

I’m currently attempting to map my existing domain, www.midsmas dot com, to my new Ghost Pro blog at midsmas.ghost dot io My domain was previously connected to a Wordpress blog hosted on Siteground, but I’ve decided to make a fresh start by switching to Ghost and starting over.

The domain was initially purchased through Google Domains, and I followed the steps as mentioned in the Ghost help article on Google domain setup. But, after learning that Google Domains doesn’t support CNAME root domain configurations and using an A record for the root domain isn’t supported either, I set up a free Cloudflare account for better flexibility, following the recommendations from the same Ghost help article.

As far as I can tell, I’ve correctly set up Cloudflare and configured everything according to the Cloudflare Domain Setup Ghost help article. The “Zones” section of my Cloudflare account shows that the zone, midsmas dot com, is active, and the dashboard message indicates that Cloudflare is now protecting my site.

In the “DNS” section, I’ve set up the following records:

And my Cloudflare Nameservers are:

  • mack.ns.cloudflare dot com
  • margaret.ns.cloudflare dot com

The last recommended step is to add an MX record for my root domain for email. However, as I don’t have an email associated with midsmas dot com and have no plans for setting one up soon, I haven’t done this.

Here’s my problem: Even though it’s been 24 hours since I made these changes, when I navigate to www.midsmas dot com, I get an ‘Error’ page from Siteground, my previous host. Also, the free SSL certificate generated by Cloudflare doesn’t seem to be active, as Google Chrome is showing me a security error. When I check DNS propagator sites, the A record appears to have propagated, but not the CNAME record, which seems odd.

Has anyone encountered a similar problem or have any idea what might be going wrong? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Joe

N.B. Apologies for the random use of the “dot com” in the URLs shared above. The forum restricts posts to three links max, which isn’t easy to adhere to when discussing domain names, so it’s a workaround of sorts! :)

2

Set the domain on cloudflare to “DNS only” (turn off proxying) until you get everything set up. You can turn proxying on after you get everything to go through.

Then go back to the Ghost Pro domain page and tell it to verify/validate (I don’t remember the exact language) the domain. Once it goes green and everything is working, then turn the proxy back on.

Depending on what your TTL was at Siteground, it might be 24 hours - sometimes NS records have really long TTLs.

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3

Your help was invaluable, thank you! As luck would have it, when I checked www.midsmas.com just now, my blog seems to be loading as it should. So, it turns out I didn’t need to implement the steps you kindly provided after all. Nonetheless, I truly appreciate your prompt response and assistance!

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4

I’m seeing an ssl error when I try your root domain. Could just be a cache problem but you may want to check that it’s working fit it.

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