Cloudflare:
Across multiple cultures around the world, this time of year is a time of celebration and sharing of gifts with the people we care the most about. In that spirit, we thought we’d take this time to give back to the developer community that has been so supportive of Cloudflare for the last 10 years.
Today, we’re excited to announce Cloudflare Pages: a fast, secure and free way to build and host your JAMstack sites.
In some ways, Cloudflare seems to be evolving into its own Internet protocol. For a long time, Cloudflare offered services like DNS, CDN, and load balancing that were external to the origin. Over the past year, Cloudflare has made a clear move to becoming a full end-to-end solution with Cloudflare Workers, Workers KV, Access, etc. Best of all, from a performance perspective, Cloudflare’s extensive network of data centers (200+ cities around the world) allows them to offer unmatched performance in terms of latency and response time.
Cloudflare Pages appears to be the next iteration of Cloudflare Workers Sites. Workers Sites, while extremely performant, was not very user friendly. I use Workers Sites to host this blog, and had to hack a custom GitHub Action together for automated deployments. Cloudflare Pages abstracts out all of that custom configuration nonsense with built-in integrations for all the popular static site generators and frameworks.
Time will tell whether Cloudflare Pages will receive significant adoption, but I’m very hopeful. Unlike Netlify, Cloudflare Pages doesn’t have bandwidth limits, and it tracks “builds” instead of “build minutes” – this is a very important point because some static site generators (not Hugo) take a considerable amount of time to build sites. Cloudflare Pages’ free plan supports 500 builds per month, which is functionally superior to Netlify’s 300 build minutes on its free tier.
I’m looking forward to testing out Cloudflare Pages for hosting this blog! I’ve already signed up for beta access, so stay tuned for a more thorough review once I’ve had some time to play with it.