i always get so confused at the cloudflare error page like "you were able to reach cloudflare but the origin site is down so you're getting this error page
isn't the whole point of cloudflare that i don't have to contact the origin site at all
i mean maybe not, i haven't used it. but that was my understanding
@monorail Cloudflare is a gate between you and the origin site; it doesn't actually serve any data itself. The way it's supposed to work is that you ask Cloudflare for the site, Cloudflare asks the site for the data, the site gives Cloudflare the data, Cloudflare gives you the data. If the site is down, Cloudflare doesn't have anything to give you.
@noelle (it totally does serve content though)
its whole thing is if someone requests a thing from your site, that thing gets cached on their servers and served from there instead until you change it
so if you post a 1mb image on a low bandwidth box, and a thousand people see it, instead of uploading 1gb, you probably only will do that once and the rest will be from cloudflare
it also means people who have slow connections to you probably won't notice since they'll only download html from you
@thingywott Oh, interesting - I didn't know that.
@noelle i mean, they aren't a particularly great company, of course (something, something, no ethical consumption)
but they really do help with a lot if your resources are limited, and is free--which is why a lot of people use them
@thingywott I started using them to firewall elekk.xyz a couple years ago when we got DDOSed; I actually hadn't realized they were doing caching on the front end. I'll have to keep an eye on bandwidth usage over the next week, now that I've disabled it, and see how much of a difference it makes.