Shared Hosting Nightmare

[artfulweb]

Well here I am 6 hrs later, having been working with their AI assistant who got me halfway set up and disappeared after it could not resolve a problem concerning the ip address of the website that it had set up but realized that the unwanted traffic is using that to continue to access the site instead of the Cloudflare address. SO now it is a real mess. Can not get the chat back.

[azpro]

First - take it easy - take the night of- try to leave your pc - make a walk and calm down. Swift action is not going to help you.

Do you have a ChatGPT account? If not - create an account - for a start Free account is fine. Could also be Claude or whatever AI you like.

Ask questions - state what is now working and what not - give bit-by-bit all the information you have. Make clear you are clueless. ChatGPT will ask you questions and step-by-step help you in the right direction. Off course try to reason yourself.

[BatteryTrader]

If you have only just changed your DNS settings to Cloudflare and using their named servers to point the traffice then its going to take at least 24 hours, more like 48 before the changes are reflected in the servers around the world.

Perhaps check your domain on link below for propagation. if they are not all resolving back to the IP's given you by Cloudflare then its not finished yet.

https://www.whatsmydns.net/

Regards

[BatteryTrader]

Just an added note

Once populated and at cloudflare, if you need to point at another server, its almost instant.

Cloudflare is not easy to navigate; the help is poor, but I would not be without it now; it works.

[artfulweb]

After being dumped by my AI assistant (maybe somewhere having it's meltdown because it couldn't resolve the issue, lol!) I opened a ticket for support. They got back to me quickly and all is up and running now. Put in the IP block to get rid of the unwanted countries flooding the server as well as the unwanted bots (does not affect Google or others you designate as good) and that works like a charm. They can even add more instructions to your robots file for better protection.

Was a bit tough to figure out the email situation as AI had me change the dns email settings whereas they should be configured to IONOS in Cloudflare and designated as DNS only (not managed by Cloudflare) to be able to receive and send no problem. My website is now ultrafast and no 500 errors and I can finally use my phpAdmin whereas it too was plaqued with "user has too many connections" so unable to use.

Set up the rules for screening so customers briefly see a security verification page as many sites are showing now. In the logs I can see which IPs failed - all from the unwanted ips and bots. All the statistics are far more detailed and complete than IONOS.

I am writing all this in case others need to switch over to Cloudfare. Now I just need to recover my clients who fled because of the problems.

So yes, I too think I can never live without Cloudflare now! Note that I did take the Pro subscription which is so reasonable for all that you get. Too bad they don't do hosting, I would change in a heartbeat.

Thanks for all your comments and assistance everyone.