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by maxjus 4839 days ago
CloudFlare is saying that the site may be down due to "excessive load." I was under the impression that this is one of the main reasons CloudFlare exists, to handle big surges in traffic like this one. Their intro video leads me to the same conclusion. Can anyone who uses CloudFlare shed some light on this?
2 comments
bkanber 4839 days ago
Cloudflare isn't too much more than a wrapper around a CDN for your static assets. The request still gets sent to your server, they just re-host your images and stuff on their edge servers. They also do some "security stuff", and can help you with minifying assets and things like that. So excessive load can still be a problem.

On top of that, the free account doesn't really come with any guarantees.

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osteele 4839 days ago
CloudFlare doesn't proxy HTML pages, by default, because so many of them are dynamically generated. You have to add a page rule to proxy HTML too.
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gwern 4839 days ago
Thanks. I was actually under the impression that CF would do HTML as well, but I searched and you seem to be right: https://support.cloudflare.com/entries/22036831-How-do-I-cac... So I'll try that out and see if it helps performance/bandwidth.
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