When I first announced Caddy, our website downloaded everything as .gz due to high traffic load -- a lesson I learned very quickly and a mistake I never made again.
Yeah, exactly. A lot goes into shipping, and sometimes things like this can be overlooked, especially on a small team that needs to deliver broad platform support right out of the gate.
There are some bugs that are just hard to find until they're out there.
I just don't understand what the thing about "downloading everything as .gz" means. It's not like a gz is a rare file format, it seems like a totally reasonable format to download something in.
Having once made a similar mistake myself, I assume what they mean is that it was downloading everything as a .gz—that is, the browser was asking users “where would you like to save index.html.gz?” instead of showing the homepage. (This happens when you precompress a static site for performance, but forget to tell the server that gzip should be negotiated as a Content-Encoding instead of a Content-Type.)
To clarify, every page load (.html file) was downloaded as a .gz file instead of being served as an HTML file and displayed as a web page in the browser.
When we first release cdnjs.com we used tools to check if the DNS had fully propagated... but it hadn't. The shame of a cdn being down in several places across the globe.
This probably falls in the same boat. :)