DNS

Our DNS records are handled by Cloudflare.

Adding a new record

To add a new record, go to Cloudflare and add a record.

Page Rules

We have some custom page rules set up on Cloudflare as well, which allow us to cache specific endpoints or create custom redirects.

For example, we have a custom page rule used to cache the API endpoint to get the list of all hacks from Gavel, for performance reasons.

Warning about root CNAME records

In the summer of 2018, we wanted https://treehacks.com to work properly (http:// and https://www. would work, but only https:// would give an error). We couldn't use Namecheap's default redirection service, because it wouldn't redirect https:// URLs. So, we tried adding a CNAME record at the root domain. However, this is a bad idea and ended up breaking all email for most of the summer, until we noticed it and reverted the CNAME record change.

We made a similar mistake in the summer of 2019. When switching from Namecheap to Cloudflare, we wanted to fix https://treehacks.com again, so we used Cloudflare's CNAME flattening feature to add a CNAME record at the root again. However, we forgot that Namecheap had provided us with email forwarding services, so all emails stopped working. Again, we only noticed this a while later. When we realized this, we switched our treehacks.com email handling to G Suite.

The lessons of this story are:

• When you make a big change to DNS, make sure you test that emails work immediately instead of waiting several weeks until the damage is done.

• Cloudflare Page Rules are probably a safer / more reliable way of doing redirects than doing DNS record redirection (with Page Rules, you can redirect from an SSL path as well -- so we could have solved our problem of https://treehacks.com using them without touching DNS).