Still a great service though, they would be big someday.
After I set up a page rule to explicitly cache and serve the entirety of the bathrooms page, things went very well. Or at least I could serve a lot more people.
My blog is hosted on a $20/mo VPS and is definitely not set up to serve that many people at one time. If I had been using a blog software that was more lightweight and where the front page wasn't nearly as large, and I was using static html files, then it would have been better, but it wasn't ever going to be great.
This scenario is actually daunting for most small sites: it's four days out, you're about to get tons of traffic, and keep it to yourself :)
Setting up Google-load-capable infrastructure in 4 days is trivial for some you on hackernews, but non-trivial for others.
Cloudflare sounds like a convenient, drop-in solution for when you don't know how to configuring your own reverse-proxy.
I am especially happy because I came to know CloudFare not through HN, but through constantly seeing their failed cache page.
Edit: That sounds really brash, but I sincerely do mean that they have lots of clients that I frequent and if their reliability improves, it will prove to be very valuable.
My blog has failed several times under load, despite cloudflare being in front of it, but at no time was it a lacking of cloudflare. It's that they are performing a CDN service which proxies the request for dynamic data back to the source (which in my case is the majority of the load, since my blog is very image-light).
Once I set up cloudflare to aggressively cache and serve a page under load, the weight on my blog's VPS was better (the load was down from 70 on a 2-core machine, and the I/O wait dropped from 95%).
Cloudflare does what they do very well, and their CEO (http://twitter.com/EastDakota) is very, very responsive to requests for help.
I'm glad I'm using cloudflare.
