Moving from Netlify to Cloudflare
I’ve used Netlify’s starter plan to host my static websites for over a year now and everything has worked exactly as advertised: they provided me with DNS servers, took care of the TLS certificates, and gave me 100GB bandwidth per month, and everything for free, so I really have no right to complain. However, I recently learned that Netlify might charge you a potentially unlimited amount of money if your site goes viral or is hit by a DDoS attack.1 Both events are unlikely, but I’d rather not take part in this reverse lottery, so I switched to Cloudflare Pages, which, as far as I understand, has a free plan with unlimited bandwidth.2
I first moved over to Cloudflare’s DNS. They automatically imported all my existing DNS records and have reasonable defaults, so all I had to do was pointing my domains to the new DNS servers via my registrar (Namecheap). Then I set up the static websites with Cloudflare Pages, which is a few clicks, before I uploaded the files on the server via their web interface. Deploying changes from the command line is easy: npx wrangler pages deploy <dir>. Finally, I changed the DNS records to point to the new sites.3
All in all, this went surprisingly smooth and will hopefully improve my night’s sleep.
Once you run out of your free bandwidth, they start charging you for extra bandwidth according to your usage. Fair enough, but there is no option to configure a monthly limit, and how much bandwidth is used is out of my control.↩︎
To be honest, I probably don’t even need 1GB per month as I don’t have many visitors and most of my pages are only a few KB of text. If they’d just switch off the lights if I ever manage to burn through more than that, I wouldn’t mind.↩︎
In case this doesn’t seem to take any effect, the problem might be the DNS cache of your router…↩︎