Every Internet user at least once faced a situation when the requested site did not open. This happens for various reasons, but most often the problem is in the hosting. Failure of the server hosting the site leads to partial or complete inoperability of the resource.
In order to eliminate similar problems in the future, Internet Archive has teamed up with Cloudflare . Sites served through this service will become members of the Cloudflare Always Online program. These sites will be synchronized with the Internet Archive database, so that they will always be available to users.
Participation in the program will need to be confirmed. Cloudflare users who wish to take advantage of this feature will be able to set up automatic submission of the hostname and site page URLs to the Internet Archive. The service will archive them and issue the last saved copy of the resource to the user in the event that the site is not directly accessible.
As with any copies of resources made with the Internet Archive, mirrors will not be fully functional, since the Internet Archive stores static versions of pages. However, textual and graphical information remains available in most cases.
The Internet Archive provides special terms for sites that are members of the Cloudflare Always Online program. Their copies will be regularly saved in the service database at intervals of 5-30 days.
At the moment, about 330 billion copies of various resources are available on the Internet Archive. The number of registered users is more than 10 million people. Thanks to the "Internet Archive", users can get acquainted with sites that no longer exist. There is also an opportunity to evaluate early versions of a wide variety of Internet resources.
In addition to websites, the service also stores multimedia content, including music. The Internet Archive also saves books, which recently caused discontent among copyright holders. Four commercial publishing houses at once demanded to remove digital copies of one and a half million books from the Open Library project. The Open Library project has been operating since 2006. In 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Internet Archive announced the expansion of the project: from March 31, users can download any books an unlimited number of times.
The Archive also stores games for retro platforms, and the service has an emulator that allows you to run these games right in the browser.
With regard to ensuring continuous access to sites, this project will start working in the near future.
