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Just Praised Cloudflare, Then Got Hit with a 504

· 3 min read
#indie-hacking#web-hosting#Cloudflare

How It Started

Just two days ago, I wrote an article called From DigitalOcean to Cloudflare Pages, praising Cloudflare from top to bottom — free hosting, blazing fast, global CDN, one-command deployment. Three websites hosted for $0/month. In China’s internet community, Cloudflare has earned the nickname “Cyber Bodhisattva” (赛博菩萨) because they give away so many products and services for free.

Today, I decided to add Google Analytics to see if anyone’s actually reading my blog.

The operation was dead simple: add the GA Measurement ID to the config, build, deploy.

npm run build
npx wrangler pages deploy dist/ --project-name=gaojiajun

And then —

✘ [ERROR] Received a malformed response from the API

  upstream request timeout
  GET /accounts/.../pages/projects/gaojiajun -> 504 Gateway Timeout

504 Gateway Timeout

I thought it was a network hiccup. Waited a minute, tried again.

Waited a few more minutes, tried again.

Three attempts in a row. The Cloudflare Pages API was consistently returning 504 — consistently enough to be impressive, honestly.

Even a Cyber Bodhisattva Takes Naps

The “Cyber Bodhisattva” nickname isn’t a joke. Cloudflare offers an absurd amount of free services — CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, Pages hosting, Workers compute. It’s so generous that people genuinely wonder how they make money.

As a proud free-tier user, I’ve always been grateful.

But today’s 504 taught me an important lesson: never publicly praise Cloudflare on your blog.

Think about it. My last article literally said “deployment is dead simple” and “one command, live in seconds.” This article is about getting slapped in the face. That’s not a coincidence. That’s karma.

Can You Even Complain About Free Stuff?

Honestly, I can’t even be mad.

A $0/month service hiccups occasionally — what are you going to do? It’s like going to a restaurant where the waiter refills your water three times for free, and the fourth refill is a bit slow. You can’t exactly slam the table.

Besides, the 504 was temporary — just wait a bit and deploy again. No data was lost. The service didn’t go down permanently.

The timing was just… suspiciously perfect.

Lessons Learned

  1. Never use a service right after publicly praising it. It’s like posting “what a beautiful day” on social media and then walking outside into a thunderstorm.
  2. Free services will occasionally hiccup. That’s why they call it a “Bodhisattva” — even Bodhisattvas aren’t available 24/7.
  3. Your local build files don’t disappear. A 504 just means the deploy didn’t go through. The website itself is completely unaffected. Just push again when the API recovers.

Epilogue

Google Analytics was successfully deployed in the end. If you view the source code of this page, you’ll see the GA tracking code sitting quietly in the <head>.

The Cyber Bodhisattva is still the Cyber Bodhisattva. Takes a nap now and then, but never truly absent.

🙏 Cloudflare, thank you. But next time, could you maybe not crash right after I sing your praises?