The spike asked what Cloudflare's free plan would and would not do for a self-hosted site on a dynamic-DNS hostname. The answer is narrower than either option the issue anticipated: the free plan supports only full setup, which requires delegating the zone's nameservers at its registrar. The zone here is synology.me and belongs to Synology, so we cannot delegate it. Partial (CNAME) setup is Business or Enterprise, and subdomain NS delegation is Enterprise. The blocker is therefore not that the useful features are paid — it is that the hostname cannot go on the plan at all. The issue asked for exactly this kind of finding to be recorded rather than treated as a reason to widen the spike.
The remaining questions are answered anyway, on the assumption that a domain we control is bought later, so that decision is made with the consequences already known rather than discovered afterwards.
Two of those consequences are worth pulling out. Cloudflare appends to X-Forwarded-For rather than replacing it, so a second proxy in front of Nginx Proxy Manager makes `trust proxy: 1` in app.ts resolve req.ip to a Cloudflare edge address instead of the client. Four limiters key on req.ip and would silently stop distinguishing callers while continuing to look healthy, which is the dangerous direction for that failure to go. Separately, Bot Fight Mode cannot be skipped with WAF or Page Rules on any plan because it does not run on the Ruleset Engine, and Cloudflare documents that it may challenge API traffic — a challenged POST /webhooks/paypal is a capture notification we never receive.
Everything asserted about this repository was checked against the code; the Cloudflare behaviour was checked against their documentation on 2026-09-05 and not against a live account, because one cannot be set up here. What was not established is listed at the end of the document rather than left implied.
Closes#285
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
