On May 14, 2017, Cloudflare announced the expansion of its Load Balancing service to all customers. This feature helps avoid website downtime caused by unreliable hosting providers, internet outages, or servers. The Cloudflare Load Balancer automatically sends notifications when things fail and come back up again. It can withstand traffic volumes that smaller providers, virtual machines, or hardware appliances cannot handle due to its experience dealing with large DDoS attacks. This also allows users to avoid business-impacting downtime when major cloud compute providers have issues. The Load Balancer provides near instant failover for proxied traffic and actively monitors traffic to alert customers of any site issues. Pricing starts at $5 per month, including 500,000 DNS queries each month.