Cloudflare has a few options you can choose from for cloudflare&lt;=&gt;origin connections. I&#x27;ve tried them all out and they&#x27;ve worked as advertised as far as I could tell:<p>I set up Cloudflare with their &quot;Strict&quot; SSL option, which requires that my origin servers use a valid TLS certificate. I paid the CA toll to get a cert for my site, and I use that cert to serve connections from Cloudflare&#x27;s servers.<p>They also have a &quot;Full&quot; option, which allows you to use a self-signed cert (with no validation -- you might be able to require validation of self-signed certs if you&#x27;re on a paid plan) on your origin servers, which is slightly more secure than the &quot;Flexible&quot; option, which uses HTTP (with no encryption) when connecting to the origin server, even though it then serves the content to end users over HTTPS with their own (valid) cert.