I recently registered a non-profit website in cloudlfare with freeplan. I configured a cache rule for one specific page (by full URL) as I expect spike in traffic during specific date and time period (around 3k req/second for short time range, like one minute, at speific date and time). This is expected traffic and I need to make srue the content will be served with 100% reliability from the cache (no downtime, no DDoS protection takes effect…) to prevent load to the website hosting server.
Is there any SLA from cloudflare if they can support this traffic in free plan? How many req/s is allowed? Are there any other rules which need to be configured to prevent any downtime during this period (f.ex. temp disabling DDoS default rules)?
May I ask what content you’re hosting? Is it a static website? How geographically distributed will the users be?
No SLA on free plan. You’ll need to pay for Business or Enterprise for uptime guarantee.
Cloudflare does not impose a request rate limit on websites.
Even with proper cache rules, a substantial amount of traffic will reach the origin while cache is being populated. I’d make sure the origin can handle at least 100 req/s.
May I ask what content you’re hosting? Is it a static website? How geographically distributed will the users be?
Yes, it’s a static website content (wordpress)
Even with proper cache rules, a substantial amount of traffic will reach the origin while cache is being populated. I’d make sure the origin can handle at least 100 req/s.
Is there a way to pre-populate the cache in advance and make it available at some point (even by manual request, sth like cache purge)?
You may consider exporting the site to static files and hosting on Cloudflare Pages. This will ensure the content is highly available under high load, as the content would be hosted on and served directly from Cloudflare’s servers.
No, this is not possible. Additionally, each Cloudflare colo (there are a few hundred of these) has its own separate cache, so even with caching you may see many requests from Cloudflare if your visitors are geographically distributed. You can reduce origin requests with Tiered Cache but 3K req/s will always result in a sizeable amount of traffic going to the origin.
I mean, you could always go with Cache Reserve and pre-populate the assets there by visiting every single URL in advance. Geographical distribution wouldn’t matter for that.