Always Online
Cloudflare’s Always Online feature is now integrated with the Internet Archive so that visitors can access a portion of your website even when your origin server is unreachable and a Cloudflare-cached version is unavailable. When your origin is unreachable, Always Online checks Cloudflare’s cache for a stale or expired version of your website. If a version does not exist, Cloudflare goes to the Internet Archive to fetch and serve static portions of your website.
When you enable Always Online with Internet Archive integration, Cloudflare shares your hostname and popular URL paths with the archive so that the Internet Archive’s crawler stores the pages you want archived. When submitting targets to the crawler, Cloudflare identifies the most popular URLs found among GET requests that returned a 200 HTTP status code in the previous 5 hours.
Note that Cloudflare does not save a copy of every page of your website, and it cannot serve dynamic content while your origin is offline. If the requested page is not in Cloudflare’s Always Online cache or the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the visitor sees the actual error page caused by the offline origin web server.
A Cloudflare crawler identifies resources to place in the Always Online cache. When Internet Archive integration is enabled, Cloudflare tells the Internet Archive what pages to crawl and how often. To ensure stability of service, Cloudflare limits the crawling interval. Limits vary by Cloudflare plan, and the Always Online crawler ignores robots.txt.
- Free customers once every 30 days.
- Pro customers once every 15 days.
- Business and Enterprise customers once every 5 days.
Visitor Experience
When Always Online with Internet Archive integration is enabled, visitors see a banner at the top of the web page explaining they are visiting an archived version of the website. Visitors can click the Refresh button to check whether the origin has recovered and fresh content is available.
When a visitor requests content for an offline website, Cloudflare returns an HTTP response status code in the range 520–527, depending on the issue. These status codes indicate that the origin is unreachable.
When the requested page is not in the Always Online cache and Internet Archive integration is enabled, Cloudflare checks the archive and serves the most recently archived version of the page.
Visitors who interact with dynamic parts of a website, such as a shopping cart or comment box, will see an error page caused by the offline origin web server.
To enable Always Online, see Enable Always Online .