Cloudflare and the Internet Archive are working together to help make the web more reliable

Cloudflare’s Always Online service caches a static version of any sites that use it. Should a site’s server get taken offline for any reason, such as a DDoS attack, visitors will still be able to view a recent version of it.

Today Cloudflare announces it is joining forces with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to make the web more reliable.

The Wayback Machine has been archiving much of the web for over 20 years now and has cached 468 billion pages to date, with more than a billion new URLs being added every day. As part of this new tie up, sites that make use of Cloudflare’s Always Online service will have their content automatically archived, and if the original host isn’t available, then the Internet Archive will step in to provide the pages.

"The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has an impressive infrastructure that can archive the web at scale," said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. "By working together, we can take another step toward making the Internet more resilient by stopping server issues for our customers and in turn from interrupting businesses and users online."

This new arrangement also means that Cloudflare’s Always Online service will provide an additional source of content for the Wayback Machine, and in some cases may be the first time the Archive’s system has even seen some of the sites in question.

The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham observes, "By joining forces on this project we can do a better job of backing up more of the public web, and in so doing help make the web more useful and reliable."

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