How to remove OneLineShield from your website

Leaving is the same one DNS record you changed to start, edited back. Here is the exact order, and the one thing to write down before you touch anything.

Your website serves visitors directly from your own server again, exactly as it did before you started.

You do not need to tell us first, cancel anything, or wait for a reply. Leaving happens in your own DNS panel, and it takes about two minutes of actual work.

Before you change anything, write down the current value of your CNAME record. That one note is the difference between a two minute undo and an afternoon of guessing.

What you added, and what each record does

Setting up put two records in your DNS. You are about to reverse one of them and delete the other.

A CNAME on your website hostname, pointing at our gateway. This is the one that decides where visitors go.
A CNAME on _acme-challenge. in front of the same hostname. This one exists so Cloudflare can renew your certificate without asking you again. On its own it does nothing.

Step 1: point your website back

Open the DNS panel for your domain, wherever it is managed today. Find the record for your website hostname and set it back to what it was before: usually your own server address, or the hostname your hosting company gave you.

If your original record was an A record with an IP address, and setup replaced it with a CNAME, then you delete the CNAME and put the A record back with that IP.

This is the step that actually moves your visitors. Everything below is cleanup.

Step 2: delete the certificate renewal record

Delete the record whose name starts with _acme-challenge.. It only served the certificate we are no longer issuing, and leaving it behind does no harm beyond clutter.

How long it takes

Visitors reach your server directly once the old value has spread. How long that takes is decided by the TTL on your record, not by us. A TTL of 300 means five minutes and a TTL of 3600 means an hour, and the record itself shows you which one you have.

During that window some visitors reach you the new way and some the old way. Both work, because your server was answering the whole time.

What happens on our side

Nothing you have to chase. Once the record no longer points at us, the checks stop finding your website and the dashboard says so.

We do not delete your hostname the moment a record changes. Removing a hostname is an action that can break a site that was working, so it is slow and loud on our side: you get told more than once, with a grace period, before anything moves.

What we still have afterwards

Your account keeps the hostname, the origin address and the history of checks we ran. We never had your pages, your files or anything your visitors sent you, so there is nothing of that kind to delete.

Removing that record of your website is not something you can do yourself yet. There is no delete button in the dashboard today, and we would rather say so here than send you looking for one.

Nothing above depends on it. Your website leaves the moment your DNS record points somewhere else; what stays behind is our record that it was once here, not any control over it.

What we store, and what we never had in the first place, is listed by name on the privacy page.

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