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Dear website owners, Please take the time to set up a service like CloudFlare[0]. It's free, and will prevent your site from going down during traffic spikes.

Dear website owners, Please take the time to set up a service like CloudFlare[0]. It's free, and will prevent your site from going down during traffic spikes. There's really no downside. Regards, Frustrated User [0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/ https://www.cloudflare.com/

jacquesm 13y ago
Just today I went to a site that uses cloudflare and they were down - because of cloudflare. Now I don't doubt that the cloudflare people will be right on top of something like that and will fix it asap but they're not a 100% solution to prevent your site from going down during traffic spikes because sites can and do go down, cloudflare or not so the coincidence with a traffic spike can still happen. The downside is clear: it's a more complex system, so the mtbf will be lower (now it is the combined downtime of 'you' versus 'you+cloudflare').
JoshTriplett 13y ago
No need for a CDN for a site like this; the content should be completely static and regenerated whenever it changes.
- 4lun 13y ago
  The server can still tank from too many requests, static or not.
  - hrrsn 13y ago
    As it has.
    - belorn 13y ago
      How do you know the site is static?
- jpswade 13y ago
  Using nginx reverse proxy would probably solve this.
gabemart 13y ago
It's not true that there's "no downside" to using CloudFlare. They've had outages in the past which have taken client sites offline [1], for one thing. Speaking personally, I've experienced subtle errors that have disappeared when I've moved my sites off the service. CloudFlare may well be great for some people, but it's not perfect. [1] http://blog.cloudflare.com/todays-outage-post-mortem-82515 http://blog.cloudflare.com/todays-outage-post-mortem-82515
- calinet6 13y ago
  Also, if you have a faster server than their infrastructure, it slows you down quite a bit. Also, it catches bot traffic for a while but then they figure out how to get around it.
  - mintplant 13y ago
    Also also, their "are you human" checks tend to show up more often than they should for legitimate users at the default security settings.

jacquesm 13y ago

Just today I went to a site that uses cloudflare and they were down - because of cloudflare. Now I don't doubt that the cloudflare people will be right on top of something like that and will fix it asap but they're not a 100% solution to prevent your site from going down during traffic spikes because sites can and do go down, cloudflare or not so the coincidence with a traffic spike can still happen. The downside is clear: it's a more complex system, so the mtbf will be lower (now it is the combined downtime of 'you' versus 'you+cloudflare').

JoshTriplett 13y ago

No need for a CDN for a site like this; the content should be completely static and regenerated whenever it changes.

4lun 13y ago
The server can still tank from too many requests, static or not.
- hrrsn 13y ago
  As it has.
  - belorn 13y ago
    How do you know the site is static?
jpswade 13y ago
Using nginx reverse proxy would probably solve this.

gabemart 13y ago

It's not true that there's "no downside" to using CloudFlare. They've had outages in the past which have taken client sites offline [1], for one thing. Speaking personally, I've experienced subtle errors that have disappeared when I've moved my sites off the service. CloudFlare may well be great for some people, but it's not perfect. [1] http://blog.cloudflare.com/todays-outage-post-mortem-82515 http://blog.cloudflare.com/todays-outage-post-mortem-82515

calinet6 13y ago
Also, if you have a faster server than their infrastructure, it slows you down quite a bit. Also, it catches bot traffic for a while but then they figure out how to get around it.
- mintplant 13y ago
  Also also, their "are you human" checks tend to show up more often than they should for legitimate users at the default security settings.