Cloudflare and our domain

Hyper Shards needs an address

Right now Hyper Shards lives on Kai and Remy's computers. For the whole world to play it, it needs a home on the internet and an address that's easy to type.

That takes a few pieces working together: a domain name, DNS, hosting, a CDN and HTTPS. Our studio uses Cloudflare for all of them. Let's meet them one at a time.

Domain names

A domain name is a website's address, like ourstudio.com. The last part, .com, is the top-level domain. You rent a domain from a registrar, one year at a time. A .com costs about US$11 a year at the time of writing. Cloudflare sells domains at cost, with no extra markup.

Renting is a contract with a yearly payment, so an adult registers it, ideally in the company's name. Turn on auto-renew: if a domain expires, someone else can buy it.

DNS: the internet's phone book

Computers find each other by number addresses called IP addresses, like 192.0.2.44. DNS (the Domain Name System) is the internet's phone book: it turns a name into a number.

When a player types our domain, their device asks a resolver, usually run by their internet provider. The resolver asks the servers in charge of .com, which point it to Cloudflare, which gives the answer. The resolver remembers that answer for a while, so the next lookup takes only a few milliseconds.

DNS records

• A and AAAA recordsPoint a name at an IP address. A is for the older, shorter IPv4 numbers, AAAA for the longer IPv6 ones.
• CNAME recordPoints a name at another name, like play.ourstudio.com at our Cloudflare address hyper-shards.pages.dev.
• TXT recordA note that proves we own the domain, for example to Google Search Console.
• MX recordSays where the studio's email goes.

The phone book is made of lines called records. Each has a type, a name (@ means the bare domain) and content. The TTL (time to live) says how many seconds resolvers may remember the answer. That's why a change can take a few minutes to reach everyone. Cloudflare's "Auto" TTL is 5 minutes.

Hosting and a CDN

Our games are static files: HTML, JavaScript, pictures and sounds that are the same for every player. Hosting keeps them on computers that are always on. Cloudflare connects to our GitHub repository: every commit to the main branch goes live in about a minute, and every other branch gets its own preview link to test first. Player saves still live in Firebase.

A CDN (content delivery network) copies the files to data centres in hundreds of cities, so every player downloads from somewhere nearby.

Bolt says: The website you are reading right now works exactly like this: Superintelligent Game Studios is hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

The padlock: HTTPS

HTTPS scrambles everything sent between the player's browser and our site, so nobody in between can read it or change it. Browsers show a padlock or a similar icon next to the address.

It matters for games too: installable web apps only work over HTTPS. Cloudflare gives our domain a free certificate, the digital ID that proves the site really is ours, and renews it automatically before it runs out.

Cloudflare does all of it

• DomainCloudflare can register our domain name, at cost price.
• DNSIt answers "where is ourstudio.com?" for players everywhere.
• HostingIt keeps our static game files online, straight from GitHub.
• CDNWhen a record is proxied (the orange cloud icon), traffic flows through Cloudflare, which serves nearby copies and blocks attacks.
• HTTPSIt gives us the padlock for free.

Bolt says: Our game has an address now. Next, we make Hyper Shards installable straight from that website.