Simple Measures to Make Axios and Express Production Ready

On August 21, 2025 PagerDuty alerted me that my Node server is taking way too long to respond.
What made this event stressful is that when I tailed the server logs, I had never seen this kind of issue before. My knowledge of devops is shaky to begin with. Meanwhile users were suffering and messages were piling up on HelpScout (this unfortunately occurred during peak hours).
Even though the issue ended up being Cloudflare’s fault which I discovered a few days afterwards, I learned a lot from this experience. It also emboldened me to take a hard look at my Node server code and, after much re...