My server was recently out of action for a brief period, and I took the opportunity to observe what happens to a Cloudflare-cached site hosted on that server. When I browsed to the site’s home page, I got a Cloudflare 502 error, and this message:
“This page (https://jdrgaming.com/) is currently offline. However, because the site uses Cloudflare’s Always Online™ technology you can continue to surf a snapshot of the site. We will keep checking in the background and, as soon as the site comes back, you will automatically be served the live version.”
But I was unable to find a way to show the Cloudflare cached version. It just kept showing me the 502 page. According to my interpretation of the ‘Why is Always Online not working?’ post (https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/202238800), I should have seen a cached copy of the home page.
Of course, when the server was down, Apache wouldn’t have been running at all, and it would have been unable to return an error code or respond in any other way; it would have looked like the web site had vanished. Perhaps that’s why I was seeing a Cloudflare error 502, and why it didn’t show the home page.
Still, I feel that Cloudflare should show a cached copy if a server disappears! What am I missing?