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Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

taras.glek.net

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Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#2
I feel like there's a large class of tools in this space now (Vercel, Netlify) that do all of this and more, and this post is less about Cloudflare Pages and more about the (really good) state of static hosting these days?

One thing that stuck out was the comment about "Twitter cards", since Vercel/Next now has this built in: https://twitter.com/vercel/status/1579561293069316096

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#3

I feel like there's a large class of tools in this space now (Vercel, Netlify) that do all of this and more, and this post is less about Cloudflare Pages and more about the (really good) state of static hosting these days? One thing that stuck out was the comment about "Twitter cards", since Vercel/Next now has this built in: https://twitter.com/vercel/status/1579561293069316096

I’m happily using CloudFlare pages. The reason I haven’t tried Netlify is that after the free tier everything seems a little overpriced. I didn’t go for Vercel because I don’t want to use Next.js and I’m afraid I’ll run across some limitation because of this. I was already using Cloudflare as a CDN for S3 and GitHub pages, and their offerings seem to be growing quickly and wanting to compete with Amazon rather than the static hosting companies.

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#4

I feel like there's a large class of tools in this space now (Vercel, Netlify) that do all of this and more, and this post is less about Cloudflare Pages and more about the (really good) state of static hosting these days? One thing that stuck out was the comment about "Twitter cards", since Vercel/Next now has this built in: https://twitter.com/vercel/status/1579561293069316096

Static hosting combined with server-side dynamic content modification using postgres was the interesting part for me.

Static hosting has historically been seen as exactly that, static and immutable.

Things like Cloudflare functions/workers can turn static hosting into dynamic content delivery while maintaining (most of) the benefits of static hosting.

Granted, this can be done whether the underlying content is hosted on Cloudflare, AWS, or a server in your garage so long as it’s proxied/CDN’d by a service like Cloudflare or Cloudfront+Lambda@edge, etc.

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#5
What is really annoying is that Cloudflare pages will strip the file extension off of your html pages, and perform permanent redirects to those new URLs. Now if you're intending on moving to a new hosting service that doesn't do that (cgi-bin), all Google search results to your site will 404.

Github pages and likely others also supports this format, so moving between those two services doesn't exhibit this problem. Moving to cgi-bin will.

I'd suggest Cloudflare shouldn't try to establish their scheme as canonical url and rather implement github pages behavior, but what do I know... I'm just hosting an old fashioned blog, not a JAMstack/SPA/whatever thing

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#8
Cloudflare Pages and Workers (and similar products) are indeed great but I recently switched over to a plain old free tier Oracle Cloud VM with FastAPI behind Nginx (Docker containers). I use Cloudflare as a proxy for HTTPS/certs. I don't have to think about Cloudflare Worker limitations, can host a Postgres instance, and simply deploy through `git pull` and `docker-compose up`.

Re: Cloudflare Pages: Best server tech since CGI-bin?

#9
The rest of the industry haven't even started figuring out what Cloudflare Pages Functions + Durable Objects can do. Workers can also send emails for free, and soon you will be able to process them as well with Email Workers. Cloudflare also doesn't charge you for egress either.
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