[TazeTSchnitzel]

I don't think it's a CloudFlare issue. Rather, people set up CloudFlare and don't properly configure it. Hence, CloudFlare passes most of the requests on directly (no caching-only rules), server goes down, and then the cached pages expire because they didn't configure the cache expiry dates on their web server.

[MPSimmons]

In my case (the bathroom ashtrays), Cloudflare hadn't had time to cache the HTML part (they normally only cache the static content, then later suck in the dynamic part to serve in the event of failure).

After I set up a page rule to explicitly cache and serve the entirety of the bathrooms page, things went very well. Or at least I could serve a lot more people.

My blog is hosted on a $20/mo VPS and is definitely not set up to serve that many people at one time. If I had been using a blog software that was more lightweight and where the front page wasn't nearly as large, and I was using static html files, then it would have been better, but it wasn't ever going to be great.

[xxdesmus]

Glad to hear the "cache everything" PageRule did the trick to help out with serving the HTML content. We are hesitant to make that a more prominent option though because caching the HTML can lead to security issues on dynamic sites (or forms that gather any kind of data). It certainly can help tremendously though for high volumes of traffic as long as the caveats are considered as well.