A few readers are reporting that they see a white screen with the error “Please wait while your request is verified error” when they try to load tidbits.com. The problem seems to vary between browsers and platforms, so many people who see it in one browser or platform don’t see it on another.
The error is coming from the Immunify360 firewall at Cloudways, the host we switched to fairly recently, and I believe it started no earlier than October 25. Cloudways support thought it was related to a Browser Cache TTL setting at Cloudflare, the content delivery network we use, but the problem has persisted for some even after setting that to Respect Existing Headers.
The other oddity is that one person saw the problem with www.tidbits.com but not with tidbits.com. I’m still trying to understand how a CNAME could behave differently from A record in this regard.
Anyway, no need to reply if everything is working for you, but if you’re seeing the problem, I’d like to add you to my data points. Thanks!
Try it now. I just purged the Cloudflare cache on the theory that perhaps something was stuck in there even though I’d reset the necessary options. www.tidbits.com seems to be working for me now.
As you probably know, an HTTP request includes the full URL, including the hostname. This is how virtual hosting (where lots of domains share a single server and its IP address) works.
So it is quite possible that the web server/CDN responding to the request is handling the two URLs differently, even if the DNS records point both at the same IP address.
Well, that’s great since troubleshooting that would have exploded my head.
It turns out that Cloudways just installed a firewall on October 25 without saying anything, which is what caused all this. I had to make several downstream configuration changes to get it all working, but it took quite some time to figure out what was wrong and find all the settings.
Cloudways seems to do a decent job of just serving the site, but I can’t recommend them based on their haphazard way of changing the environment with no notice.
