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Comment by wldlyinaccurate | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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').

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

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.

Also also, their "are you human" checks tend to show up more often than they should for legitimate users at the default security settings.

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

The server can still tank from too many requests, static or not.

As it has.

How do you know the site is static?

Using nginx reverse proxy would probably solve this.

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