Kristin Tarr
David Zakur
Tom Paseka
CloudFlare Team
Matthew Prince
Michelle Zatlyn
Damon Billian
John Roberts
Kevin Wilson
John Graham-Cumming
Dane Knecht
Website is Unavailable
If you can’t get to your website and you see a cached copy of your website or a “Your Website is Unavailable” error page, the first thing to do is to check if your server is having issues.
How to quickly test if your server is having issues
For Mac Users:
Open the application called terminal on your Mac, and run the following curl command to see if your server is responding:
curl -v -A firefox/4.0 -H 'Host: yourdomain.com' YourServerIP
--> YourServerIP: You can get the IP for your server origin by checking your DNS Settings page on your CloudFlare account. It will look something like 192.73.146.94
CURL for Windows
If you get an error message like "can't connect to host" or "500 internal server error", then this means that your server is not responding. You should contact your hosting provider and work with them to resolve the server issue.
If you get HTML returned, but you still get a site offline or unavailable message from CloudFlare, then this means that connections from CloudFlare's IPs are being restricted or blocked at either the hosting provider or server level. Please make sure that the CloudFlare IP addresses are whitelisted on your server and with your host.
If you can't access cPanel or use FTP
CloudFlare acts as a reverse proxy. As a result, you can still access cPanel or use FTP, but you will have to do so a little differently. To access cPanel or FTP:
Accessing cPanel with CloudFlare
Certain scripts on my website (like ads or social plugins) are breaking or not working
CloudFlare has two beta features that speed up the loading of your web pages, but they can sometimes cause issues.
Rocket Loader
Rocket Loader can potentially impact JavaScript calls on your site, including things that potentially use jQuery. For example, if you see an ad widget breaking, it is possible that Rocket Loader is breaking the JavaScript and you should turn this feature off by going to your CloudFlare Settings page.
If you want to keep Rocket Loader turned on for the performance boosts, you can make some edits for the service to ignore certain scripts on your site.
Note: Rocket Loader is defaulted to off upon signup. Once you turn it on or off, the change takes less than 3 minutes to take effect.
Auto Minify
Auto Minify rarely impacts CSS and JavaScript. However, Auto Minify can sometimes cause issues if you already have another minification service turned on. We recommend that you only have one minify option turned on for your website.
The changes I made to my website aren't appearing:
If you're making changes to the static content CloudFlare caches on your site, including changes to JavaScript, CSS or images, it can be very easy to forget that you need to turn CloudFlare Development Mode on to bypass our cache so these changes appear immediately.
If you forgot to turn on Development Mode when making the changes, you can always purge your CloudFlare cache to have these changes appear immediately. Just a reminder that by purging the cache for your website, there will be a performance impact for a couple of hours.
Preventing site issues while on CloudFlare
The most important step you can take is to make sure that your server or hosting provider has the CloudFlare IP ranges whitelisted. If any attempts to connect to your site are blocked or limited in any way, this could create connectivity issues to your site for some of your visitors.
Another very important step you can take is to install mod_cloudflare (which is an Apache module) on your server. mod_cloudflare will restore the original visitor IP back to your server logs, and is also a good way to reduce the probability that your hosting provider will limit connections from CloudFlare's IPs. If you are not using Apache, we have a list of solutions for nginx, Windows and others in the CloudFlare Wiki.
CloudFlare is Having an Issue
CloudFlare runs 14 data centers around the world. Sometimes issues arise at one of our data centers, and we deal with these quickly (on average, in less than 10 minutes). Only visitors in that geographic region are affected.
- We make all announcements on CloudFlare's System Status Twitter handle.
- If you do not use Twitter, you can also follow updates on the CloudFlare system status page.
If you get a report from one of your visitors that they can not connect to your website:
1) Check to make sure your server is online (see instructions on to do this above)
2) If your server is online, make sure CloudFlare’s IPs are not being blocked
3) If your server is online and CloudFlare’s IP are not being blocked, send us the report here. In your email, include:
i) Your website
ii) Where the visitor is geographically located (Issues are almost always isolated to one of our data centers. By knowing where they are located, we can investigate much quicker)
iii) A description of the error page they are seeing
iv) The output of a traceroute (if possible)
4) Temporarily deactivate CloudFlare for your website by choosing ‘Deactivate’ from your CloudFlare control panel. Choosing deactivate means that CloudFlare will continue to resolve DNS for your website, but none of your traffic will pass through our performance and security network. If it is a CloudFlare issue, this will immediately resolve the problem and our team can investigate the report. Once we’ve identified what is wrong, you will easily be able to reactivate CloudFlare. Note: You do not need to change your name servers.
I hope these tips help you troubleshoot some of the common issues users have on CloudFlare. Please let us know if there are any other areas of confusion that we can address in either our help section or in another CloudFlare blog post.
Comments (16)
We have advised you that the CloudFlare block in Threat Control does not fully block visitors at this time (it throws up a challenge page). While we will likely build a version that allows for a full block in the future, you would have to do full blocks in .htacess for now.
to your server). What kind of difference are you seeing?
Thanks
It can take about 5 minutes or so for it to take effect.
is this some kind of bug or what?
thanks anyway.
The trigger for the challenge page is based on IP. See here:
http://www.cloudflare.com/wiki/DataSources
"accessing my webpage in linux environtment."
Is this happening in admin section of site, or is it happening on main site?
Website Offline, No Cached Version Available
The website you are trying to access is currently offline. The most likely causes are the server is down for maintenance, there may be a network problem, or the site may be experiencing excessive load.
The site uses CloudFlare in order to help keep it online when the server is down by serving cached copies of pages where they are available. Unfortunately, a cached copy of the page you requested is not available, but you may be able to reach other cached pages on the site.
If you continue to receive this error after you believe the site is back online, you can retry a live version of the site.
I just want it back working The worst thing I did was use cloudflare I now have no website working
problem was that the hosting co swopped servers and all the sites that were on my own dns ie ns1.property-france.com, ns2. property-france.com worked the property-france site that was using cloud servers beth.ns.cloudflare.com jim.ns.cloudflare.com stoped working and when i went to cloudflare I was informed I did not own this site (property-france.com) which I do and upon checking my enom account there was no problems there .I tried to alter the cloudflare settings it locked my out saying it was owned by some one else so i changed the dns back to my enom settings To try to resolve this and it still shows this page
Website Offline, No Cached Version Available
The website you are trying to access is currently offline. The most likely causes are the server is down for maintenance, there may be a network problem, or the site may be experiencing excessive load.
The site uses CloudFlare in order to help keep it online when the server is down by serving cached copies of pages where they are available. Unfortunately, a cached copy of the page you requested is not available, but you may be able to reach other cached pages on the site.
If you continue to receive this error after you believe the site is back online, you can retry a live version of the site.
I just want it back working The worst thing I did was use cloudflare I now have no website working
john seymour
Reply to this discussion
Reply to this discussion
We have had no system issues lasting several hours at all. What was happening re: error messages? What was the domain?
Since I hadn't done anything to switch them, I was confused. I finally managed to get the servers pointing where they suppose to but not after having my website down from early in the evening until early the next morning.
The site is http://fidlerten.com
Please explain to me why this happened and if I am to use your service, how am I able to make sure this doesn't happen again. I do not want my site down for several hours, obviously.
Thank you for responding.
fidlerten
It is very difficult to check with the domain off of us right now. If you switch the nameservers back to us & have an issue, then temporarily deactivate us so we can troubleshoot (you can temporarily deactivate by going to settings->Pause CloudFlare).
As stated previously, we haven't had any downtime going for several hours at all. If you run into the same issue when you change back to CloudFlare, please get a traceroute to the domain so we can see if there is some other issue happening (the traceroute helps us look at the network path).
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