Someone has reported this. Has anyone else found an intermittent connection, or some error message?
I cannot see any issue.
No issues for me.
There was a global outage this morning that may have affected some people. Nothing local most likely.
Global outage was related to Fastly – I expected their shares to drop today but they jumped almost 11%.
Never heard of Fastly. What does it actually do? All the online descriptions are just fashionable BS 
The guy who reported the non-access was in Canada; why can’t a web client in Canada access a server in Europe, directly?
Peter wrote:
Never heard of Fastly. What does it actually do?
I read that but it is all trendy BS
Content delivery – wow wot is dat? I though that’s what the internet did: delivered content
But yes it sounds like a network of proxy servers, which is why the chap who reported this was seeing funny error messages which were nothing to do with our server. I wonder how this outfit makes money. Who is going to pay for a proxy server unless the upstream data link is crap? And it should not be crap; there is a vast bandwidth across the Atlantic today; much more than needed apparently.
EuroGA uses Cloudflare which is a proxy but we use it for more mundane reasons, like dealing with https certificate hassles; straight bandwidth allowance is a very long way from being an issue (a factor of 10-20). I also put CF on my own website for that same reason. But they are free for nonprofit users.
Peter, CDN is more like a local cache with a lot of bandwidth, used for static content.
Lower latency for the customers, less traffic to your website.
That way you customers need to go your site for the dynamic content only.
Well, not to your website directly – typically to the Cloudflare, then to your website, but you see the point.
Peter wrote:
But yes it sounds like a network of proxy servers
So-called “reverse” proxy servers, that’s my understanding, yes.
Peter wrote:
I though that’s what the internet did: delivered content
Yes; these guys do it fast at large scale, that’s all. Their scale also allows them to better ride out (D)DoS attacks.
Peter wrote:
I wonder how this outfit makes money. Who is going to pay for a proxy server unless the upstream data link is crap?
My understanding is that websites pay them to “deliver their content”. They may have a “no-money free” tier for “small” websites, but big ones pay. These guys have their “reverse proxy servers” on all continents, “closer to the end-user”. When you get to the scale of e.g. CNN, well, one upstream data link will not suffice, so instead of each of CNN, NBC, etc building their own planet-wide (or at least “North America-wide”) network, they contract that out to Fastly, Akamai, … which build one network for many customers. Also, for some customers the (D)DoS protection alone is worth paying for, even if the upstream data link is not the issue in normal times.
Peter wrote:
EuroGA uses Cloudflare which is a proxy but we use it for more mundane reasons, like dealing with https certificate hassles
You still need a valid X.509 (“https”) certificate on your server behind Cloudflare, for the connection between Cloudflare and you, don’t you? So how does Cloudflare help in “dealing with https certificate hassles”? (On a sidenote, Let’s Encrypt made that very automated, set it up once and then forget about it.)
Yes but it can be non-expiring, and you create it yourself, for nothing.
No such thing as “set it up once” in IT. Everything breaks eventually and then you have to throw money at somebody to fix it. And usually you pay heavily because every programmer hates fixing somebody else’s stuff. The only thing which is free in IT is something that doesn’t exist in the first place.
The real art in IT is setting things up so you are not dependent on any one person or any one system. And set it up so that disaster recovery is simple – a one button click restores an image backup, or some such. This usually means keeping things very simple.
