From experience, using two services (active/active) is really the only way to avoid downtime. DNS can be trickier, but there are providers that can fallback automatically or split requests (dnsmadeeasy etc)

Haha, people pay you to bid-snipe on eBay for them?

It just baffles me that manual/third-party bid-sniping is still a thing. eBay has had automatic bidding for more than twenty years. You'll pay the same whether you put in the winning bid a week in advance or 5 seconds. But people see that "you lost this auction" notice and they're irrationally convinced that it would have gone differently if they'd bid at the last minute, somehow.

Sniping is the only rational way to big on eBay. You bid a single time, with the absolute maximum you would go for, and put it in the last 10 seconds. It prevents both you and your opponents from raising the price irrationally. Automatic bidding just encourages prices to go up, based on emotion. Sniping in the last few seconds removes the emotional component.

This absolutely does work. If you get outbid normally on eBay, say at least half an hour or so before the auction ends, then people get irrational and you quickly end up in a bidding war. This way, as a bidder, you set the maximum price you are willing to pay outside of a heated 'damn, I missed out' mentality and people don't have time to respond.

Also this helps when placing bids on auctions that end when you're asleep and you want to effect the above. I've tried to do it manually in the past but naturally life intervenes and you're somewhere with no signal or in the middle of something. Having tried it both ways sniping is definitely better than regular bidding.

If other bidders are irrational, then bid-sniping can work. It doesn't give others the opportunity to contemplate, "I've been out-bid, do I actually want this item more than I originally thought?"

And it's well-known since early eBay days that many bidders are irrational, including but not limited to competitive impulse to "win". Plus you sometimes have shill bidders.

Sniping approximates sealed bids, with the highest-bidder the second-highest sealed bid amount or a small increment above it. (Unfortunately for eBay, that would tend to decrease their cuts, unless the appeal of the sealed bid format brings in sufficiently more bidder activity.)

Another advantage of the software/service is that it automates. If you want to buy a Foo, you can look at the search lists, find a few Foos (possibly of varying value in the details), say how much you'll pay for each one, and let the software attempt to buy each one by its auction end until it's bought one, then it stops. If eBay implemented this itself, it might be too much headache in customer support, but third-parties could provide it to power users.

(I don't buy enough on eBay anymore to bother with anything other than conventional manual bids, but I see the appeal of automation.)

If everyone is using a bidder like this, isn't it essentially like a blind auction?

Maybe use cloudflare only for the landing page and docs but serve your bidding app frontend and backend directly? Since users are already there it will only affect first load :)

That is exactly how we use Cloudflare, but I appreciate the guidance. I am new to devops.