In recent years, Cloudflare just creeped out of nowhere and gain significant traction especially for their Pages & analytics side of things. Previously they were known for their security and that too for business and organizations, with the increase in demand for CMS like Hugo & Ghost; people are more likely to use headless servers to hosts their static websites.
Cloudflare
I have been using Cloudflare since 2022 and I still use it mainly because of these reasons:
- Price: Cloudflare is quite cheap especially for high bandwidth websites, Netlify has a pricing structure where if you exceed from the pre-determined bandwidth range, you will be charged. I can’t say how much it is since its subject to change and will not stay the same in the future, you can view their pricing here: https://www.netlify.com/pricing/ When it comes to Cloudflare, you get unlimited bandwidth especially via their CDN network which is unhinged to be honest.
- Ease of use: Cloudflare does have a learning curve especially if you are new to this however its quite easy and has much more useful features, it integrates well with GitHub and is flawless when it comes to building sites from source. Usually it takes around 5-7 seconds for me to push and for my website to update (currently I have 350 pages & 5 redirects)
- Speed: The speed of Cloudflare CDN is unmatched, from building to serving the websites all across the world, its just works and it works better than anything else out there, with that pricing & speed its a no-brainer to use Cloudflare.
When it comes to Netlify, I haven’t yet used it however some people I know do use it and the crux is that its very very easy to use however again the bandwidth hinders you to switch as soon as you hit that limit which might be some work especially if you have a complex work flow. Using Cloudflare since day 1 is much more easier and you will benefit from it significantly more: financially as well as just website performance. Few more advantages include:
- Unlimited accounts
- Unlimited sites
- 100 custom domains/website (if own a domain already)
Cloudflare has a registrar as well which is great as it has cheap domains and works right of the bat with Cloudflare Pages. However, as of 2023, you cannot change Nameservers on a free Cloudflare account so keep that in mind before buying a new domain. You can always point another domain towards Cloudflare and use it with Cloudflare’s CDN.
For all the job seekers out there, Cloudflare is used in many businesses so having experience in it already can be quite helpful.
For more information on how to use Cloudflare with GitHub, you can checkout my guide here: How To Use Cloudflare & GitHub to Host Your Static Site
That’s it <3