CloudFlare®-i katkestus: lahendusi ja alternatiive

Too big to fail does not apply in the world of servers. Regardless of your provider you need to have redundancy to achieve 100% uptime. It is all about avoiding the single point of failure.

CloudFlare® is down?! It’s impossible!

The outage has been a reality for many during half an hour. If you run an ecommerce website with a order every 20 seconds: it must have been painful.

Why so many people use CloudFlare® in the first place?

The answer is simple: it is free and fast!

How could you limit such outage in the future?

Unfortunately CloudFlare® does not allow secondary NS usage (which makes senses if you want to limit DDoS attacks, because you want to shield your main server as much as possible). Siiski oleksite võinud katkestust oluliselt piirata, kui te seda ei kasutanud “Automaatne” TTL-i seadistus CloudFlare®-is. Tegelikult pole midagi automaatset: see on tegelikult TTL 300 seconds (5 min). Kui oleksite seadnud katkestuse kestusest kõrgemale TTL-i, oleksite võinud oluliselt piirata mõju oma kasutajatele.

Kuldne reegel: määrake alati kõigi oma kirjete kõrgeim TTL.
See on: kui te ei kasuta CloudFlare® puhverserverit/CDN-i/vahemälu

Kas loobute CloudFlare®-ist??

Kõik sõltub teie vajadustest: kui juhite isiklikke veebisaite, siis on CloudFlare® kindlasti parim. Kui teil on hõivatud veebipood ja soovite CloudFlare®-i alles jätta: siis peaksite rakendama vähemalt ülaltoodud kuldreeglit. Siiski võite kaaluda allpool toodud alternatiive.

Millised on CloudFlare®-i alternatiivid?

There are really two main groups:

Free alternatives
Paid alternatives

The free alternatives to CloudFlare®

Do not sign-up for free trials or free plans that limit the amount of queries per month: that will lead to a disaster! Once the limit is reached, the DNS requests will simply be left unanswered, turning you offline. It is also very easy to attack such websites and bring them down.

Most of the domains’ registrars include a free DNS service: you can easily use it and deploy this where you have registered your domain name. Bear in mind that when you transfer your domain names out: you are going to lose all of your DNS records… If you always renew at the same registrar then no problem.

If you run 2 servers or more: you can deploy a cluster and serve your DNS from those different servers.

Finally the last alternative is to switch back to self-hosted DNS.

The paid alternatives to CloudFlare®

The best paid alternative is nothing else than Route 53 from Amazon AWS®. All other offers are either overpriced, obscure (prices unknown), või not redundant enough due to a low amount of PoPs (Points-of-Presence). The deployment is so redundant that the engineers at AWS® use different domain extension as NS servers: