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Real-time validation methods

When you use a real-time validation method, Cloudflare verifies your customer’s hostname when your customers adds their DNS routing record to their authoritative DNS.

​​ Use when

Real-time validation methods put less burden on your customers because it does not require any additional actions.

However, it may cause some downtime since Cloudflare takes a few seconds to iterate over DNS records. This downtime also can increase - due to the increasing validation backoff schedule - if your customer takes additional time to add their DNS routing record.

To minimize this downtime, you can continually send no-change PATCH requests for the specific custom hostname until it validates (which resets the validation backoff schedule).

To avoid any chance of downtime, use a pre-validation method

​​ How to

Real-time validation occurs automatically when your customer adds their DNS routing record.

The exact record depends on your Cloudflare for SaaS setup.

​​ Normal setup (CNAME target)

Most customers will have a CNAME target, which requires their customers to create a CNAME record similar to:

mystore.com CNAME customers.saasprovider.com

​​ Apex proxying

With apex proxying, SaaS customers need to create an A record for their hostname that points to the IP prefix allocated to the SaaS provider’s account.

example.com. 60 IN A 192.0.2.1