JAMstack Update: November 9, 2019

This week began with the unexpected horror: An outage on JAMstack sites! Netlify sites were down for the better part of the morning and afternoon on Monday. This was a big deal because I don’t remember it happening before. I mean This is what we talk about when we talk about JAMstack!

I had one client—just before we built him a JAMstack site last year—spend the better part of a weekend scrambling to add servers to his Wordpress site because it crashed just when (and because) he was getting a lot of traffic. He was very relieved to get away from all that. Server downtime is not a place I want to revisit, yet here I was on Monday faced with explaining to clients why the sites that were never supposed to go down were down.

Fortunately I had data on my side. I was able to show our clients through our Pingdom monitoring tool that they actually had 99.99% uptime and a 256 millisecond average response time. I got to talk about just why our sites were typically so stable and talk about DDoS attacks and how web hosts are typically able to mitigate those attacks. At the Cloudflare Connect conference this week I learned just how hostile the internet is with billions of attacks per day, and felt relieved that we are already in the best possible position for having a stable platform.

So what started as a “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” ended up as an opportunity to learn and talk about why we use JAMstack in the first place.

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