CloudFlare helps MoogMusic.com survive the Google.com doodle search traffic

CloudFlare helps MoogMusic.com survive the Google.com doodle search traffic(blog.cloudflare.com)

28 points by emilw 14 years ago | 10 comments

pooriaazimi 14 years ago |

... and yet I've seen CloudFlare cache fail many times (like a couple days ago, a story on HN front page about airplane bathrooms having ashtrays: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4005906).

Still a great service though, they would be big someday.

TazeTSchnitzel 14 years ago | |

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 14 years ago | | |

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.

JCB_K 14 years ago |

When Cloudflare has a high-profile client, they'll often blog about it. It's a smart marketing technique, because they lift on the publicity around the client.

ericclemmons 14 years ago | |

True, but the most important thing is that it worked.

This scenario is actually daunting for most small sites: it's four days out, you're about to get tons of traffic, and keep it to yourself :)

Setting up Google-load-capable infrastructure in 4 days is trivial for some you on hackernews, but non-trivial for others.

Cloudflare sounds like a convenient, drop-in solution for when you don't know how to configuring your own reverse-proxy.

nl 14 years ago | | |

Cloudflare is much, much more than a reverse-proxy. It is more comparable to Contendo (now part of Akamai), but Contendo charged thousands for what CloudFlare does for free.

ianbishop 14 years ago |

I'm happy to hear that CloudFare was able to help out in this situation.

I am especially happy because I came to know CloudFare not through HN, but through constantly seeing their failed cache page.

Edit: That sounds really brash, but I sincerely do mean that they have lots of clients that I frequent and if their reliability improves, it will prove to be very valuable.

xxdesmus 14 years ago | |

Just as a note -- a site offline page indicates a back end origin server issue in the vast majority of instances. That wouldn't be short coming of CloudFlare though if the back end web server is having issues.

MPSimmons 14 years ago |

I'm very happy with my experiences with CloudFlare.

My blog has failed several times under load, despite cloudflare being in front of it, but at no time was it a lacking of cloudflare. It's that they are performing a CDN service which proxies the request for dynamic data back to the source (which in my case is the majority of the load, since my blog is very image-light).

Once I set up cloudflare to aggressively cache and serve a page under load, the weight on my blog's VPS was better (the load was down from 70 on a 2-core machine, and the I/O wait dropped from 95%).

Cloudflare does what they do very well, and their CEO (http://twitter.com/EastDakota) is very, very responsive to requests for help.

I'm glad I'm using cloudflare.