What are these error notifications I am getting from Cloudflare?
It’s easy to take the complex network of solutions working around the world to power the internet for granted. From the time you hit enter on your keyboard, to your internet browser connecting to a website, your request has passed information across data networks throughout the world.
Sometimes these requests can take longer than expected to process, or return a message that the requesting server was not expecting. When this occurs, your hosting server notes the error in a log so that it can be reviewed by your IT Team, and appropriate action can be taken.
Cloudflare is our preferred DNS provider and works to keep your data secure while routing requests from end-users through servers closer to their geographic locations. In Layman’s terms, this helps shorten data request routes, and in theory, your website should load faster.
Some Common 4xx & 5xx level server response codes include:
- 408 error – Request Timed Out
- 502 error – Bad Gateway (man in the middle got no response)
- 503 error – Service Unavailable
- 504 error – No response from upstream server
- 520 error – Unknown error (catch-all response)
- 521 error – Web Server is down
- 522 error – Connection timed out
- 523 error – Could not reach web host server
- 524 error – Gateway Timeout
What do I need to do to address these issues?
There is no pressing action that needs to take place. The errors that are being reported by Cloudflare are common errors that occur throughout normal server use/lifecycle. No hosting environment offers 100% uptime, and these types of errors occur if your server is offline for even a fraction of a second.
For example, here is WP Engine’s official position on server up-time:
WP Engine will make the Services available 99.95% of the time, excluding any Excused Downtime
Excused downtime can come from things like network infrastructure updates or server migrations. They typically take place during periods of low aggregate web traffic (overnight, holidays, weekends) and involve advanced notice from WP Engine.
Occasionally site outages can occur from other servers and data centers that make up the larger internet infrastructure.
Important note about Cloudflare
Cloudflare provides a truly excellent product. Many of our clients will never need to utilize more than a free Cloudflare account. Occasionally we may recommend upgrading your account to a pro-level account ($20/month) to accommodate for additional speed & security needs.
It’s important to keep in mind that Cloudflare is a publicly-traded company. Their goal is to increase revenue by transitioning free customer accounts into paid accounts, and paid accounts into higher tiers of service or add-on features.
One such additional feature is load balancing. This email is disguised as a server log report when in reality it’s an advertisement for Cloudflare’s load balancing service at an additional price of $5 per month. In short, load balancing looks to further optimize data requests for incremental performance gains.
Next Steps
With issues such as this, our official position is that no further action is required on your part.
If we were to request additional steps they would be…
- Uptime Monitoring
- There are many paid services that monitor how often your server goes offline, and what caused the issue. This will provide us with data to help troubleshoot larger infrastructure issues
- Load Balancing
- Cloudflare’s DNS setup is already incredibly optimized, and night and day from any hosting company’s default DNS options. Load balancing can help make additional incremental speed gains.
