Tuesday, 08 March 2022 12:26

Cloudflare "Always Online" to be completely powered by the Internet Archive

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Back in 2020, Cloudflare started connecting with the Internet Archive (archive.org) for some sites using its Always Online feature.  In July 2022, cloudflare is announcing that ALL sites will use the Internet Archive, rather than Cloudflare itself hosting the "always online" version.  

Here is the full announcement from Cloudflare:

Hi there,

Always Online is a service that delivers archived content when Cloudflare is unable to reach your origin server. For more than a year, Cloudflare’s Always Online service has been, in part, backed by our partnership with the Internet Archive.

As of 12 July 2022 Cloudflare is moving Always Online to be completely powered by the Internet Archive. As a result, Always Online will also no longer be enabled by default for certain websites, meaning that if you want to use Always Online you must manually enable it in the Cloudflare dashboard.

Users who have enabled Always Online powered by the Internet Archive will see no change in behavior. Users who have not enabled Always Online and want to continue to use the functionality should follow these steps:

Navigate to the Cloudflare Dashboard
Select the configuration page of the Caching section
Scroll down to find the Always Online tile and make sure you press “update”
Note: if you just see the toggle “on” it means you are already enabled and do not need to do anything else.

Opting-in to use Always Online means we will share publicly-available URLs from your 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 This allows for us to make sure they have relevant content should we need to find an archived version to send to visitors.

If you choose to not enable the version of Always Online backed by the Internet Archive, we will not check for archived versions of your website if your origin is unreachable. This may result in additional errors being delivered to visitors when your origin cannot respond.

Background information on Always Online
In an older version, Cloudflare would crawl and archive pages for retrieval by Always Online. To provide a better service, we are now partnering with the Internet Archive to power Always Online. 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.

For more information on Always Online backed by the Internet Archive please read our blog or the Internet Archive’s announcement blog.

Reminders:
Jul 12, 2022 If you want to continue to use Always Online, follow the steps above to ensure you’ve enabled Always Online backed by the Internet Archive.

Kind Regards,
The Cloudflare team

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