Moved the blog hosting to Cloudflare Pages

As anticipated in a video I posted on YouTube, last week I moved the blog from Netlify to Cloudflare Pages.

I have 1 main reasons for this. That’s bandwidth costs. Starting from last July, I started getting billed from Netlify every month.

I appreciate the service Netlify provides for me, but I’ve got to pull the plug. Each time I am billed $20 for extra bandwidth. July 2020, August, September, October, November, December, January 2021, February (2 times), April (2 times), May, June, July, August, September, October. That’s a total of $340 just to keep the blog running. The blog is the thing that’s consuming the most bandwidth.

This was a change that was long due.

I tend to sit on decisions like those, as it’s a big change. I don’t want to change something that’s running well.

I also don’t want to spend $240 every year when there are services that would provide the same service for free.

Enter Cloudflare Pages. They provide free bandwidth. And the same service, essentially.

Netlify is a great service for the JAMStack, and it provides many features I don’t even use. Like advanced team functionalities, identity, forms, split testing, and more.

I’m just using the bare bones, the essentials: deploying a static site. That’s it.

Cloudflare Pages is a more bare-bones setup. It does not have all that stuff, but it provides 2 things that Netlify does not provide.

One is free analytics. Netlify has analytics, but I’d have to pay $9/m which is not something I want to.

And the other is, Netlify has 7 CDN nodes, while Cloudflare Pages has more than 200. This means the site will be faster in many more places of the world.

I detailed my move to Cloudflare Pages in the video, so I’m not going to repeat it here. If you are interested in that, check out the video.

So far, I’m very happy about the move.

I moved the blog to Cloudflare Pages initially, and then I also moved some of the sites I use for courses, for simplicity as they are subdomains and I let Cloudflare handle all the configuration automatically.

But I have lots of other sites hosted on Netlify, which might stay with Netlify forever.

One thing I will gradually do however is to move domains to the Cloudflare Registrar, because they register and renew domains with no markup pricing, so a .com domain ends up costing $8.57 instead of $14.99.

Registering through Netlify has been a really pleasant experience. You create a new site, deploy from GitHub, register the domain and it immediately works.

It’s wonderful.

But now I have about 20 domains, some registered there, some in other places, and it all adds up.

So if I can reduce that amount and also get a service that provides several interesting services like Cloudflare does, it’s a good deal.

In other words it’s a big cleanup, long time due.