Websites run on servers that can be located anywhere on Earth. These servers run non-stop to accept users' request, process information, and deliver users' inquiries.
The thing is, no matter how good the servers are, downtimes can happen. Even websites running on the most powerful and and the most reliable servers can still experience some hiccups. This can be an issue, simply because downtimes ruin experience, increase bounce rate, and make websites lose users and money.
Cloudflare is an American web infrastructure and website security company that provides content delivery network (CDN) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation services.
Cloudflare also has what it calls the 'Always Online' service, where its bot would crawl and archive its users websites, so visitors of the websites would not encounter an error if the websites' server goes offline.
In 2020, Cloudflare improved this feature by partnering with the Internet Archive.
"By partnering with the Internet Archive, we can provide additional resilience to our customers should wider service outages exist as well as rely on the Internet Archive’s expertise in crawling and archiving functionality," Cloudflare said at the time.
"If your origin server is ever unavailable, Cloudflare will serve a limited copy of your cached website to keep it online for your visitors. Cloudflare builds the Always Online version of your website, so your most popular pages are represented. Cloudflare is caching pages when you see the crawler in your logs," explained Cloudflare.
And starting 12 July 2022, Cloudflare is moving Always Online to be completely powered by the Internet Archive.
With this change, Cloudflare is stopping Always Online from being enabled by default for certain websites.
What this means, webmasters and web owners who wish to use Always Online, must manually enable it through the Cloudflare dashboard.
"Users who have enabled Always Online powered by the Internet Archive will see no change in behavior," Cloudflare explained in an email to all users.
By using Always Online, users must know that Cloudflare will share publicly-available URLs from their website with the Internet Archive.
"This allows for us to make sure they have relevant content should we need to find an archived version to send to visitors," continued Cloudflare.
Opting out and not using Always Online backed by the Internet Archive will not make Cloudflare check for archived versions of the website if its origin server is unreachable.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince once said that the company's Always Online feature saves "a limited copy of your cached website to keep it online for your visitors," and by partnering with the Internet Archive, Cloudflare can power its Always Online with the Wayback Machine.
This Wayback Machine has cemented a long history in documenting the entire World Wide Web, and using it "will improve the Always Online service."
"The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has an impressive infrastructure that can archive the Web at scale," Prince said.
On the internet, there is no way to guarantee all websites to keep going online without interruption.
This fact makes the Wayback Machine a valuable tool that could be traced back to 1996.
"We’d just like to make the web more reliable," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.
"We want a robust infrastructure out there and we can be part of it, but we’re not all of it. We want multiple participants to be working together in all different ways. We would not be a very good content distribution network and maybe Cloudflare wouldn’t necessarily be the best archive of the web."
Kahle said that the partnership with Cloudflare has been very constructive in early testing, and he'd like to see more collaborations that cross what he calls "the .com, .org boundary."