OnlyDNS

Comic-style illustration: Jorge wearing a dunce cap standing in front of a TV showing a football match with a 2-1 scoreline, while to his right a Mac mini with a monitor displays the text 'ONLY DNS' in large letters.

Table of contents

My Problem 🤔

In a previous article I talked about how La Liga was blocking my website during matches. People trying to visit my portfolio and blog would find that the page simply would not load, just because my domain went through Cloudflare’s infrastructure, and La Liga was blocking entire IP ranges from Cloudflare to crack down on illegal streams.

I knew it. I documented it. And I left it there.

For months I did nothing to fix it. Not out of laziness or because I thought it was complicated — but out of anger. My website worked perfectly fine; it was La Liga that was applying indiscriminate blocks and making it unreachable. It was not my fault. So I stood my ground: I should not have to be the one to make a move.

So I did nothing. For months.

The thing is, I had Cloudflare’s proxy enabled — the famous orange cloud. My site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, so everything lives within the Cloudflare ecosystem. But with the proxy turned on, traffic goes through Cloudflare’s CDN/proxy layer, which uses shared IP ranges. And those ranges are precisely the ones La Liga was blocking.

My Solution 🧩

The solution is to disable Cloudflare’s proxy and switch to DNS-only mode — the grey cloud.

With the orange cloud active, Cloudflare acts as a “shopping mall”: every visitor enters through the proxy/CDN door, which uses shared IP ranges alongside thousands of other sites. Those are the IPs that La Liga blocks in bulk to stop illegal streams — and my website ends up as collateral damage.

With the grey cloud, Cloudflare becomes just a “traffic director”: it resolves the DNS and points directly to Cloudflare Pages. My site is still hosted on Cloudflare, but traffic arrives through the Pages IP ranges — which are different from the proxy ones and are not on La Liga’s blocklist.

The process in the Cloudflare dashboard is straightforward:

  1. Log into the Cloudflare dashboard and navigate to DNS > Records.
  2. Find the records pointing to the site — usually an A or CNAME record with the domain name.
  3. In the Proxy status column, click the toggle with the orange cloud to turn it into a grey cloud (DNS only).
  4. Save the changes.

The change propagates within minutes. From that point on, traffic arrives through a different route within Cloudflare — one that is not in the crosshairs of La Liga’s blocks.

Since my site is static and still hosted on Cloudflare Pages, I notice virtually no difference in speed. I lose some proxy-layer features — like CDN-level firewall or caching at their edge nodes — but for a static portfolio website those benefits are marginal compared to the upside of having the site accessible to everyone during matches.

My Result 🎯

My website now loads during La Liga matches. Anyone trying to visit my portfolio or blog while the Champions League anthem is playing will no longer be greeted by a blank screen.

Five minutes. One click. Months of problems solved.

The lesson I take away is not technical — it is pragmatic. Whether I was right or not, my problem was either going to be solved by me or by no one. And I do believe I was right: my website should not have to be collateral damage from La Liga’s blocks. Thanks, La Liga.

Keep coding, keep running 🏃‍♂️