xCloud now offers Cloudflare Enterprise CDN for $5 per month per domain, a fraction of typical enterprise costs. The tutorial covers two setup paths: enabling it for domains already in Cloudflare within xCloud, or configuring external DNS providers like Namecheap with specific CNAME and TXT records. Features include full-page caching, unmetered DDoS protection, and support for any site type.
Chapters
I want to tell you about xCloud's cool new feature to provide for you Cloudflare Enterprise CDN at only $5 a month per domain. Why is that cool, you may ask? Well, the word enterprise typically means high traffic and high dollar. Enterprise tools are very expensive. It says right on the site here that I'm going to show you in a sec that this contract doesn't really have a price. They don't publish a price. If you want Cloudflare Enterprise CDN, you have to go to them and negotiate a contract to figure out how much it's going to cost for you. It's often many, many thousands of dollars per month. And so to be able to get it for only $5 a month is a pretty sweet deal. Let me show you. All right, this is the xCloud site about this. And you can see right here that it usually costs thousands a month. xCloud paid this. They got the really expensive enterprise contract and they allow you to piggyback on that for only $5 a month per domain. Now I'm going to show you some stuff on the site. It's not very often I'm impressed by a marketing site. I've seen a few thousand of them in my time. This one's pretty great. Well, you know what? If you're not familiar with Cloudflare, that's a whole nother video. You should check it out. If you are familiar with Cloudflare, then you probably know a lot of this. It serves your site from a city close to the person requesting it. Full-page caching, unmetered DDoS mitigation. That's amazing. There's just— there's a whole bunch of stuff here. You should check this page out. A couple of sections I want to point out. This block here, often on a marketing page, I don't read this stuff. There's too much here. This is all really good stuff. It talks about how much it costs and why. It talks about DNS servers. You don't have to change DNS or name servers or any of that stuff. You can keep what you have. All of this stuff. Uh, this one's particularly key. Why pay $5 when some hosts offer it for even free? And right here it says because free comes with their servers attached. One of the great things about xCloud is that you can put your site on a VPS of your choice, and this works with all of them. Another is that many of these only offer it, uh, with WordPress or WooCommerce. And xCloud offers it for Laravel and raw PHP stuff, all kinds of stuff. Uh, so it's a really good deal. Um, and the frequently asked questions section right here is also great. I read every one of them and I don't usually do that. Um, so all that to say, check out this page. It's really great. There's a link in the description. Next, I'm going to show you how to set it up. Both if you have Cloudflare connected to your xCloud account and if you don't. So it's for people using either. So let's get started here. The first site we're going to do it on is this one, cybernate360.com. This one is connected to Cloudflare. You can see it here within xCloud, which means it can do all kinds of stuff with, with Cloudflare. Including set up the enterprise stuff. So in the left column is Cloudflare Enterprise. We click that, and right here I can enable Cloudflare Enterprise. I say pay now, and away we go. And it is— it's started, it's happening. It's going to set up some DNS records automatically in Cloudflare so you don't have to to do anything if you're connected to Cloudflare. So I'm going to just leave you for a sec while this runs. It doesn't take more than a couple of minutes, but you don't want to sit here. We're done. This is all connected. It's all green and it's already working. I'm going to go over just a few things and then we'll do the other domain name. So right here is settings and these are things that are always on. So, um, it will serve a cached version if you're down. Uh, uses HTTP/3, uh, tiered caching, Brotli compression, all that stuff. Then you have some choices you can make. Um, early hints, um, whether to use their caching or not. ScrapeShield, uh, edge, edge page caching, which I recommend. I'm gonna turn that one right on. Okay, excellent. So that means that your regular caching does not need to be there. Cache bypass paths, image optimization, that's great. There's just, there's a ton of settings here and you should go through them. I'm going to click Save Changes real quick. Then there's analytics. I just turned it on so I don't have any, but you can learn all about your traffic, what countries, hosts, source device types, all that stuff. And then we have security. Again, I don't have any data because I just turned it on, but you can learn all kinds of stuff in here and it's really good stuff. I'm also going to show you how to set this up without having a Cloudflare account at all. Previously, I had my xCloud account connected to Cloudflare, so it just magically used that. But some people don't have a Cloudflare account. So I'm going to show you how to set it up using any other provider for DNS. I'm using Namecheap. You can use anything. So let's get started. We're going to enable it right here. And it's still setting up a little bit. There are some things that I want to point out because they're really important. This specifically right here, a domain name can only have one A or AAAA or CNAME record. Adding this record will replace your existing one and immediately take over live traffic for this domain. Expect brief downtime while DNS propagates. Add it only when you're ready to cut over, not before. So that means there will be a tiny bit of downtime for your site while you set this up. How much? Well, it's DNS. Officially, 24 to 48 hours. Unofficially, it usually updates for me in 2 to 3 minutes. I just set up DNS for this domain name without Cloudflare, just a single A record, and it took about 6 minutes. So there's that. Just be aware that that's a thing. Maybe do it in the middle of the night or whatever. So what we're going to do is take these DNS records and put them into Namecheap. So let's get started. I'm going to do the CNAME first. All right, now that they're all in there, I'm going to save all changes and verify records after DNS has a few minutes. It says auto setup has a minute left. So, all right, we're back and DNS has propagated. And you can see now that these are all verified after I push the verify records button. But I need to point something out that's a unique quirk of Namecheap. You'll see here that the CNAME, the value includes the domain name and same for down here. And that does not work very well on Namecheap. I was a little confused. xCloud support was amazing as always and helped me out. But here's what we needed to do. For these, we just needed to use the@ sign and the www here. But for this CNAME, we just took off the domain name. So it's just this. And the same here for this TXT record. There's no domain name there. And that was it. After that, it still took like 24 hours, which is unusual. But, you know, DNS, what are you going to do? But now that that's done, we're using Cloudflare Enterprise on this domain without having any kind of Cloudflare account at all, uh, which is pretty slick. If you don't want to have a Cloudflare account, um, you still get access to this excellent enterprise toolset. So there we have it, Cloudflare Enterprise available to you for only $5 per domain per month. Uh, something you probably shouldn't afford for just a single small site, but xCloud makes it possible.
