Cloudflare protects your hosting IPs address?

[TheGamer]

Hi. I was advised by one hosting support that I can host multiple websites on their hosting plan and as long as I used Cloudflare, Google or any other search engine will only see Cloudflare's IP and my hosting account's IP won't be publicly accessible. Is this correct? Context: I want to hide the IPs as they will be an obvious footprint for the tiny PBN I have. Thank you!

 

[flprocess]

This is partially true. In order to avoid your emails being rejected you need to declare your server IP in DMARC and/or SPF zones. Cloudflare will advice you that your true IP will be public.

 

[praetserge]

https://hostadvice.com/tools/whois/ shows that they can only see cloudflare but I'm not 100% sure

 

[TheGamer]

This is partially true. In order to avoid your emails being rejected you need to declare your server IP in DMARC and/or SPF zones. Cloudflare will advice you that your true IP will be public.

Thank you flprocess. Two follow up questions:
1. If I don't add server IP in DMARC and SPF zones, will it affect anything else other than email deliverability? Hoping they are not mandatory.
2. Any other way in addition to above you can think of how a search engine could still find out the IP of the hosting server behind cloudfare?

 

[flprocess]

Thank you flprocess. Two follow up questions:
1. If I don't add server IP in DMARC and SPF zones, will it affect anything else other than email deliverability? Hoping they are not mandatory.
2. Any other way in addition to above you can think of how a search engine could still find out the IP of the hosting server behind cloudfare?

1) tbh I can't give you a full answer on this one. logic says it will not affect anything else, but there are many factors regarding SEO which i'm not fully knowlegable at.

2) if someone knows Google's exact process he must be very wealthy imho Google doesn't try that hard to figure a website's ip, it's pretty common for search engines to just check name servers. best way to be sure is to buy different web hosting package from a big company (even in various locations) so IP will not be the same - or just invest in dedicated IP for each account. if you are looking for the free alternative, Cloudflare might be your best choice.

 

[Ashk881]

Hi. I was advised by one hosting support that I can host multiple websites on their hosting plan and as long as I used Cloudflare, Google or any other search engine will only see Cloudflare's IP and my hosting account's IP won't be publicly accessible. Is this correct? Context: I want to hide the IPs as they will be an obvious footprint for the tiny PBN I have. Thank you!

This is somewhat true.
Cloudflare caches your static content and serves it through their CDN. So if you are using a CDN and your content is cached, any visitor including Google crawlers should technically only see the CDNs IP.

This however only applies to static content. If your site does anything dynamic like an AJAX request or you dynamically generate content those would still have to reach your server. Thats not including all the cache misses. This will expose your servers IP and may probably be noticed by googlebot.

So when can that happen and can you prevent it? Well, you can't say for sure when a CDN cache miss occurs and when cloudflare redirects a client to your site. If your site is a WordPress blog this probably doesn't happen a lot since it's mostly static content (although your content still gets dynamically generated but since it doesn't change often, cloudflare probably caches them).

This tho IMO a weak strategy for a PEN. It's a "good to have" but shouldn't be relied upon imo.

 

[Deleted member 1393709]

Yes, Cloudflare will hide all your IPs. If you don't leak the IP of your website from Mail Records (MX) you will be fine.
But there are few tricks to discover the IP behind the Cloudflare.

 

[Stefan Lange]

Yes, Cloudflare will hide all your IPs. If you don't leak the IP of your website from Mail Records (MX) you will be fine.
But there are few tricks to discover the IP behind the Cloudflare.

like what? cpanel ports?

 

[deemcord]

Yes, Cloudflare protects your hosting IPs address.