Custom domain returns Cloudflare 404 despite valid Vercel configuration

Help
1

I have a static website deployed on Vercel with the custom domain birthdaywishs.in.

Vercel shows both birthdaywishs.in and www.birthdaywishs.in as Valid Configuration, with www.birthdaywishs.in connected to the Production deployment.

My DNS is managed by GoDaddy:

  • A @ → 216.198.79.1
  • CNAME www → birthdaywishs.in
  • Nameservers: ns43.domaincontrol.com and ns44.domaincontrol.com

However, accessing https://www.birthdaywishs.in returns:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Server: cloudflare

I contacted Vercel’s support assistant, which said Vercel’s edge sees the domain correctly and serves it with HTTP 200, but traffic from my devices is being intercepted by Cloudflare.

There was an _acme-challenge CNAME pointing to:

birthdaywishs.in.a2a5947319618a50.dcv.cloudflare.com

I deleted that record from GoDaddy. I verified directly against both authoritative nameservers that it is now NXDOMAIN.

The important diagnostic result is:

curl -I --resolve www.birthdaywishs.in:443:216.198.79.1 https://www.birthdaywishs.in/

returns:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Vercel
X-Vercel-Cache: HIT

But the normal request:

curl -I https://www.birthdaywishs.in

still returns:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Server: cloudflare

This happens from multiple devices/networks.

Could someone from Vercel help identify why the normal request is still reaching a Cloudflare edge despite GoDaddy being the authoritative DNS provider and the Cloudflare ACME record having been removed?

2

There’s another community post with 404 debugging tips that might be helpful. Please give these solutions a try and let us know how it goes.

A human should be around soon to offer more advice. But you can also get helpful information quickly by asking v0.

3

It’s returned a Cloudflare 404 because it’s pointed at a Cloudflare destination that doesn’t currently exist. The CNAME record needs to be updated to match the value instructed in the dashboard. It would be something like 42d84707b7dcdff2.vercel-dns-017.com.

There’s a domain troubleshooting guide that can help you debug other configuration issues, like the extra _acme_challenge record the support agent found.

I hope that helps!