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Setting up the Peakhour service can be done is a little as 5 minutes, however there are some technical items you need to check before you start. If you need assistance or clarification please contact us.

  1. DNS Conflicts

    Using the Peakhour service requires you to change your root domain record and the www record to point to route traffic through Peakhour. This may sometimes cause issues if services on your zone, eg mail, point to the root record (as a CNAME or MX record) instead of directly referencing the appropriate IP address. For example Cpanel will commonly set up a mail CNAME record pointing to the root record along with MX records. These records MUST be updated to not rely on the root zone record before pointing to the Peakhour service, otherwise mail will no longer work.

  2. Automated third party services accessing your site

    Peakhour has sophisticated BOT detection and blocking capabilities. If you have automated services crawling your site or accessing APIs that are critical, then you need to take note of the IP ranges that they come from. They can then be added to the Firewall access list.

  3. Peakhour getting blocked by your server

    Peakhour is a reverse proxy and therefore sits between your website and your end client. This means that once you have successfully pointed your domain to Peakhour, your website will only be receiving visits from our IP addresses. On rare occassions your existing firewall or hosting provider may need to configured to allow these IP addresses, otherwise they might start blocking Peakhour and your website will no longer be visible.

    Some third party sitebuilders have WAF or Bot mitigation as part of their service, these services (eg Shopify) hide a lot of detail from you and do not let you bypass specific IP addresses, please contact our support team for advice.

  4. Client IP Addresses in server logs

    Using Peakhour means that requests to your server will come from our IP addresses. This will affect your access logs if you rely on them for client analysis. Peakhour forwards the original requesting IP address in the following header:

    X-Peakhour-IP

    This will allow you to configure your logs to grab the requesting IP address from there.

  5. Wrong Origin Server IP

    At service setup, Peakhour automatically scans your DNS and uses the IP address that the root record resolves to as our setting for your origin server. If you are using an existing CDN/Reverse Proxy service like Fastly or Cloudflare then the IP we pick will be the Cloudflare/Fastly IP, not your actual server IP.

    In this case you must enter your actual server IP on the Peakhour service settings page before you point your domain to Peakhour.

  6. Cloudflare Zone negative caching

    If your website DNS is with Cloudflare, and your www record is currently an A record, then there is a danger of negative caching when updating DNS.

    Cloudflare sets up zones with www as an A record by default. Unfortunately Cloudflare does not allow you to change the type of an existing record when editing. To change www from an A record to a CNAME requires deleting the A record first and then adding the CNAME. There will be a brief period where no record for www exists in your zone. If a client queries your DNS during this period asking for the location of www, then Cloudflare will cache the 'negative' response for 1 hour. This means that there could be an outage for your website of 1 hour when moving over to Peakhour using CNAME pointing. If your site is busy this is going to be hard to avoid.

    To minimise the risk, perform the change at the quietest time of the day for your website, and have the add form already filled out on the DNS page so you can delete and add as quickly as possible. If the risk is unacceptable then your www can be pointed as an A record, however you will lose DDOS mitigation capabilities if you do this.