Custom domain for white label

Question

I have a CakePHP web app hosted on app.mydomain.com. The DNS of this is managed by cloudflare and I am using Cloudflares free SSL.

Now I want a client to use his domain as a white label.

app.clientdomain.com ------> app.mydomain.com

This is not a domain redirection. I tried to find out and it seems something with custom CNAME pointing. Any help regarding this is really appreciated.

It is necessary for the app to have an SSL. The app.mydomain.com has an SSL, but the client might not. How do I cope with that?

I understand I can just tell the client to set A records to my server IP, but that is not what I want. I do not want to give away my IP and would like to use my cloudflare as DNS resolver.

I have tried searching everywhere for this and couldn't find much. If you could also tell me what this is called, I can hopefully search more about it.

Thank You :)

Answer 1

Compare to similar applications

What is described in the question is a fairly standard thing. Compare with equivalent instructions from, for example, google apps:

Follow the instructions that appear to add a CNAME record for each service address you're customizing. To add a CNAME record, sign in to your account at your domain host's website, not with Google.

For example, to create the Gmail address mail.yourdomain.com, add a CNAME record that points mail to ghs.googlehosted.com. Your domain host records will look something like this:

----------------------------------------------
| Type | Name or Host | Value or Address     |
----------------------------------------------
|CNAME | mail         | ghs.googlehosted.com |
|CNAME | calendar     | ghs.googlehosted.com |
----------------------------------------------

SSL

It is necessary for the app to have an SSL.

You're likely to have problems with this. Because cloudflare isn't likely to even route requests that hit it for app.clientdomain.com unless that domain name exists on their servers. If you continue to use cloudflare's free plan, you or the client are going to have to add their domain to cloudflare so that it'll route requests - and if the client wants to use their own ssl certificate, that certificate needs uploading to cloudflare (which means: you or they need a business plan) as that's where requests for app.clientdomain.com are going to go.

All in all if this is your business plan it seems incompatible with using cloudflare - unless the idea is to force clients to use cloudflare too.