Hi everyone. I wanted to apologise for the down periods we've had over the last couple of weeks and explain what's been going on. A couple of weeks ago we signed up with CloudFlare, a CDN and distributed domain name server service. It's informally billed as "Akamai for the little guy". On the surface it sounds fantastic. They cache content, protect against hack attempts and route requests to DNS servers close to your geographic location. When it was working, there were definitely great speed benefits - pages were loading in a jiffy - but when it was not working - everything fell apart.

They seem to be a frequent recipient to DDOS attacks - the very thing that they are supposed to help mitigate - and this brings their nodes down in various locations at different times. See their status page. This means that sometimes sifters from Los Angeles might not be able to access the Sift while people from New York are just fine. It's an untenable situation for us - monitoring our own servers and the 20 or so nodes that CloudFlare has as well.

So we quit. We've had a very bad experience with CloudFlare and are moving back to our own server and a standard CDN service for static files. If you are looking at CloudFlare for your own website, I don't recommend it.

Even though we shouldn't be having any more CloudFlare outages into the future - we're also struggling with one of our own servers that doesn't want to play nice with its friends. We're hoping to have that resolved soon.

So sorry again for the outages - should be a lot less from here on out.