We have our one, primary server here in the U.S.

That way, if you’re in New Zealand for example, you’ll likely load the copy of the page that Cloudflare stores on a New Zealand server, rather than having to connect all the way to our server in the United States. This website uses one as well, called Cloudflare.Įssentially, CDNs work to help websites load more quickly by spreading the same content around to different servers, that will load more quickly for visitors around the world.įor example, copies of the page that you’re reading now may be stored on more than 200 different servers across the world. Reddit utilizes something called a content delivery network, or CDN. We now know that Reddit has hundreds or even thousands of different servers, all working together to deliver content smoothly.īut did you know that there’s another layer to it all? Reddit certainly could rent more servers and dedicate more staff to ensuring near-100% uptime, but this is likely far more expensive than just letting the site go down for a little while during peak moments. While obviously their situation is a little more complex than this example, this is believed to be the most likely scenario.

Ultimately, Reddit has likely found it to be more profitable to let the site go down for a period of time, than to rent extra servers for these brief surges in traffic. This presents two options.Įither Reddit can rent more servers that will rarely get used, or they can allow the site to go down for some people. However, Reddit knows that during major events – whether they be sudden, or scheduled (like big sports finals for example), they will experience a surge in traffic that will send them over capacity. The extra servers are there so service will remain stable even during the busier hours of the day. So, for most of the day, they could effectively get by with half the servers if they needed to. Throughout most of the day, their servers may not even be operating at 50% capacity. Let’s say that Reddit had 500 servers to use. The problem is, renting hundreds or thousands of servers is expensive, and Reddit has never exactly been the most profitable company. People are more likely to browse during their lunch break at work or school, than they are at 3 AM – at least in countries where usage of Reddit is popular. This is particularly true during major, newsworthy events, but also during certain hours of the day. Like the rest of the internet, Reddit is prone to massive surges in traffic. Traffic surges and Reddit’s lack of server capacity go hand-in-hand. Well, there’s another explanation for that… 2. Now surely you must be wondering – if Reddit is such a large company now, couldn’t they just buy more servers? Surely they could afford it, couldn’t they? This inevitably has contributed to Reddit’s frequent downtime and connection issues. So, as Reddit has grown, so has the complexity – and the computer hardware needed to serve all visitors coming to the site. Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong commented that Reddit had hundreds of servers back in 2015, and this number could be into the thousands today. Instead, traffic is split up among many different servers. Reddit however handles much more traffic than one server can handle on its own. On sites even smaller than this one, a single server can be shared by dozens of websites at once. That is, one computer dedicated to hosting our pages and delivering content to you. On a small website like the one you’re on now, we only use one primary server.

Instead, the number of servers they have simply isn’t enough to support the number of people trying to use the site. Most of the time, Reddit does not go down because of any sort of technical error or bug. Larger Sites Are More Difficult To Manage

Reddit down