Some of you might have had some trouble accessing hubski even after the issues with our datacenter were resolved. We had reports of receiving 503 error pages when trying to visit on some devices while being able to access hubski on other devices. Turns out that we were caching error pages for users who were not logged in.
One of the benefits of being logged into hubski is that you automatically get redirected to HTTPS making sure your connection is encrypted as well as getting a direct connection to our main server. If you aren't logged in (and haven't manually gone to a HTTPS url or the login page) we use a nice bit of software called Varnish to cache whole pages and effectively speed things up while diverting load from our main server. This is particularly useful if we have a wave of traffic coming from places like reddit who likely don't have accounts.
Unfortunately by default it seems that our varnish cache caches error responses such as 503 quite happily. So, anyone who went to http://hubski.com and wasn't logged in got a super fast 503 page! Oh the joys of technology. Good news is everything should be fixed now and our Varnish has been updated to not cache error responses.
I've never heard of that http/https switching method. I'd think larger websites would benefit from it, but does varnish cache frequently enough to not hinder lurkers?
It's actually something I picked up from the reddit devs. We only cache pages for 1 minute, so it really just helps ward off huge spikes in external traffic (which we get from time to time) but for some reason it held onto this one record for two and a half days.