Cloudflare and Internet Archive have teamed up to keep websites always online, even if the origin servers are down.
So when the server is down, websites that use Cloudflare’s Always Online service will have the opportunity to display the version of their website that they have achieved with The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine service.
In this way, both entities seek to prevent web pages from being unavailable due to a problem. And they will achieve it with different measures.
On the one hand, increasing the level of archiving of the web, which is in charge of The Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. On the other hand, there will be Cloudflare, which will allow customers of its Always Online service to share their hostname (server name) and URL with the Wayback Machine so that their website will be automatically archived in this service. The archived version will also be updated periodically.
In this way, when a website is down, Cloudflare will be able to resort to the most recent version of it stored in the Wayback Machine — so that the archived version replaces the original one and deliver it to the users who wish access that page.
According to Matthew Prince, CEO and one of Cloudflare founders, “The Internet Archive Wayback Machine has an impressive infrastructure, capable of archiving the web at scale. Working together we can take another step towards increasing the resilience of the Internet by blocking server problems for our customers, and avoiding online disruptions to businesses and users.“
Today, the Wayback Machine has archived 468 billion web pages. Its director, Mark Graham, notes that they archive URLs “that are identified through various methods. Among them the tracking of lists of millions of pages, as submitted by users through the save function, and as they are added to Wikipedia or referenced in tweets. Also based on other signals and sources, such as various news feeds.” Graham also notes that “we will now have an additional source of URLs to preserve, customers of Cloudflare’s Always Online service.”
