Fail-open behavior

The principle

If anything in the RenderBeam pipeline fails — DNS lookup, project lookup, renderer timeout, cache miss with origin down — traffic falls through to your origin. We never block a real user because of an internal problem on our side.

What fail-open means in practice

• Renderer timeout → bot gets the origin response unchanged.
• Project not found → request passes straight to origin.
• Edge can't reach renderer → origin response returned, error logged on our side.
• Cache miss while origin is up → render normally, no fallback needed.

Who falls through

Both bots and humans benefit. Humans always go to your origin; bots only get the rendered version when rendering succeeds. If it doesn't, they get the same raw HTML a browser would have gotten — which is no worse than not using RenderBeam at all.

How to detect a failure

Check response headers:

• X-Rendered-By: RenderBeam and X-Cache-Status: HIT|MISS → we served it.
• Neither header present → request fell through to your origin.

In the dashboard, fail-open events show up as 5xx rows in Bot Activity with source = origin-fallback so you can investigate without losing visibility.