I decided to investigate this comment to see if we (CloudFlare) actually had failed while this story was hot.

Bottom line is that the site is on CloudFlare, and during heavy load (probably from Hacker News) the site did go down or slowed a lot. Unfortunately, it's the real web server that died or went very slow and not anything in CloudFlare.

The server appears to still be having problems because if I browse to other pages on the site (e.g. http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/sysadmin-calendar/) you'll see that CloudFlare's "Always Online" is enabled and showing a cached version of the page. Here's a picture of what that looks like: http://i.imgur.com/QIeQF.png

Is the site only partially cached in CloudFlare or something? Seems like with your "Always Online" feature, a dead server should trigger CloudFlare's "Always Online" feature and show a cached version for all the pages.

We do not cache the entire site with Always Online. The Always Online feature will display a limited cache of the site's content.

Isn't this exactly what "always online" it supposed to prevent?

It worked fine for me until I tried to post a comment, then I saw the caching online/offline issues from cloudflare.