Cloudflare

[Kerwin]

I generally prefer to use static site generators for blogging but it can be a bit of a pain to get it up and running on the web. I mainly used GitHub Pages because I already pay for Github.

Then I found Cloudflare. The only requirement is that your project uses one of the supported static site generators and have your website stored in a Github repo (the repo can be private which is very much welcome).

You need to transfer your DNS hosting to Cloudflare which doesn't take long and shouldn't cause any downtime if planned properly.

Now the best part of all of this is it is that it is completely free. The pricing details can be found here:

Workers & Pages Pricing

Explore pricing and plans across Cloudflare’s development platform for serverless applications and JAMstack websites.

www.cloudflare.com

That'll get you multiple hosted websites with a global CDN and security built in.

 

[NickZ]

I don't like cloud service and avoid CDN anyway.
techgenix.com/7-biggest-cloud-outages-services-2021/

Why don't I like them? The block users, request endless verifications.
CDN is another issue. People come to our site and from there is the picture or file request getting you a longer time for loading. There is no quicker way than a picture laying on the same server where your site is hosted at.

 

[Kerwin]

I don't like cloud service and avoid CDN anyway.
techgenix.com/7-biggest-cloud-outages-services-2021/

Why don't I like them? The block users, request endless verifications.
CDN is another issue. People come to our site and from there is the picture or file request getting you a longer time for loading. There is no quicker way than a picture laying on the same server where your site is hosted at.

Going single server is great if your customers are near your server. If not then a CDN does speed things up due to proximity. Anyway a CDN will make a positive difference to how fast your page loads assuming all the static files are stored on the CDN. Obviously there is more to it than that. You need to optimise your images and video and you need to make you are not pulling in megabytes of JavaScript and CSS.

Also if you think that you are more capable than the current big clouds of keeping your website up and running (or more to the point the server hardware it is hosted on) than Amazon, Google or Microsoft then you are mistaken.

Who hosts your website? Are you on bare metal? What happens if the server crashes? How many other people are sharing the server with you? Are you in danger of having another user on your server using up all of the resources? Honestly the argument about big cloud is not about reliability it is about price.

 

[fisicx]

I have my own fully managed server. I host around 20 client sites. That covers the cost of the server. Which means I host all my sites for free. Tried cloudflare and performance wasn’t any better so there is no benefit in me to going all cloudy.

 

[Kerwin]

I have my own fully managed server. I host around 20 client sites. That covers the cost of the server. Which means I host all my sites for free. Tried cloudflare and performance wasn’t any better so there is no benefit in me to going all cloudy.

Yes but if your server goes down for whatever reason you are going to get a lot of angry phone calls / emails. You need some sort of redundancy to minimise the risk of downtime.

 

[fisicx]

Yes but if your server goes down for whatever reason you are going to get a lot of angry phone calls / emails. You need some sort of redundancy to minimise the risk of downtime.

Hasn’t happened in the 10 years I’ve had my own server. The kit is pretty reliable these days.

I understand why people use cloudy hosting but it’s not right for me. The main reason is how it caches things. If you are doing development it really slows things down.

 

[Kerwin]

Hasn’t happened in the 10 years I’ve had my own server. The kit is pretty reliable these days.

I understand why people use cloudy hosting but it’s not right for me. The main reason is how it caches things. If you are doing development it really slows things down.

Fair point. I'm building something that will require multiple dedicated servers so I try and find the most reliable option I can.

 

[Ozzy]

I’m a big fan of CDN’s and for this site we use Cloudflare for its protection features, not the CDN although that comes as part and parcel.

One of our products is basically like Wordpress for legal services, and we have that running on a distributed network with load balancers and CDN, and distributed database and file storage (pdf docs). It’s needed for that product, but isn’t needed for my daughter’s brochure website for her business.

So yeah I personally like Cloudflare but only for sites that would benefit from it, the hosting framework you use needs to match the product your hosting.

 

[Kerwin]

I’m a big fan of CDN’s and for this site we use Cloudflare for its protection features, not the CDN although that comes as part and parcel.

One of our products is basically like Wordpress for legal services, and we have that running on a distributed network with load balancers and CDN, and distributed database and file storage (pdf docs). It’s needed for that product, but isn’t needed for my daughter’s brochure website for her business.

So yeah I personally like Cloudflare but only for sites that would benefit from it, the hosting framework you use needs to match the product your hosting.

If you want to start a new site really quickly look into Hugo and Cloudflare Pages.

 

[gpietersz]

I have my own fully managed server. I host around 20 client sites. That covers the cost of the server. Which means I host all my sites for free. Tried cloudflare and performance wasn’t any better so there is no benefit in me to going all cloudy.

I tend to agree. I have my own server too and am moving everything I can over to it. Hosting static sites is easy too and they tend to be fast.

CDNs are good if static assets are the problem, rather than generating dynamic HTML or returning API responses etc.