You can point a subdomain of your Cloudflare-managed domain to a site hosted by another vendor. Nothing needs to be purchased and no hosting is transferred.
How it works. A subdomain is a single DNS record in your domain’s Cloudflare zone.
Steps.
- Have the hosting vendor create the site on their account and give you the target. This is either an IPv4 address for an A record or a hostname for a CNAME record.
- In Cloudflare, add the record: set Type to A or CNAME, Name to the subdomain label (for example ‘app’), Content to the target, and Proxy status to DNS only (grey cloud).
- The vendor issues the SSL certificate on their hosting.
Propagation is typically immediate at Cloudflare’s nameservers.
Optional. Once the certificate is issued, you can switch the record to Proxied (orange cloud) if you want Cloudflare’s proxy in front of it.