Moving Blog Hosting to Cloudflare Pages: Reduced Costs and Improved Performance

As mentioned in my recent YouTube video, I made the decision last week to migrate my blog from Netlify to Cloudflare Pages.

The main reason behind this change was the growing concern of bandwidth costs. Starting from July last year, I found myself being billed by Netlify on a monthly basis. While I appreciate the service they provide, the extra bandwidth charges were becoming a significant expense. In total, I had spent $340 to keep my blog running smoothly.

This transition was long overdue. I had taken my time to carefully consider this move, as it was a significant change and I didn’t want to disrupt a system that was working well. Moreover, spending $240 annually on bandwidth when there are alternative free solutions available was not sustainable.

Enter Cloudflare Pages, a platform that not only offers free bandwidth but also provides a similar service to Netlify. While Netlify offers a wide range of features, such as advanced team functionalities, identity, forms, and split testing, I only required the basics: deploying a static site. Cloudflare Pages fulfilled this requirement adequately.

Although Cloudflare Pages lacks some of the additional features provided by Netlify, it offers two key advantages that influenced my decision. Firstly, it provides free analytics, which Netlify charges a monthly fee of $9 for. Secondly, Cloudflare Pages boasts a robust network of over 200 CDN nodes, compared to the 7 nodes offered by Netlify. This means that my site will experience faster loading times in more locations around the world.

For more detailed information regarding my migration to Cloudflare Pages, I encourage you to watch the video mentioned above.

Since moving my blog to Cloudflare Pages, I am extremely satisfied with the results. In addition to the blog, I also transferred some of the subdomains and sites I use for courses to Cloudflare Pages, simplifying the configuration process. However, certain sites hosted on Netlify will continue to remain there indefinitely.

In the future, I plan to gradually transfer my domains to the Cloudflare Registrar. They offer domain registration and renewal at fair prices, ensuring I don’t pay any unnecessary markups. As a result, I can register a .com domain for just $8.57, instead of the usual $14.99.

Registering domains through Netlify has been a pleasant experience thus far. The seamless process involves creating a new site, deploying from GitHub, and registering the domain, all of which immediately start working.

To summarize, this transition represents a significant cleanup effort that was long overdue. By reducing the number of domains and benefiting from the range of services offered by Cloudflare, I am confident that I have made a smart decision both in terms of cost savings and improved performance.

tags: [“blog hosting”, “Cloudflare Pages”, “Netlify”, “JAMStack”, “bandwidth costs”, “CDN nodes”, “domain registration”]