I throw everything I experiment with at Cloudflare, including my personal website and the family’s Internet stuff (websites, etc). None of them is commercial. Cloudflare tells me that it served 68.44 GB in the last 30 days, and the Invoice was ZERO.
I’ve been looking for an extra-cheap CDN, and I’m not so worried about high uptime. I’m not yet ready to cough up the cost for Cloudflare R2 and AWS CloudFront, though it’s not costly, but I’m still in that cheap-feeling phase and not ready to offload over 100GB of files to the public while paying a price.
I looked at Bunny CDN a while back, but I remember thinking that the minimum was like ~$50. What did I miss? I dismissed it as non-personal option.
I’ve come past way beyond the 1st year honeymoon with AWS.
Edit:
I’m sorry but I’m today years old learning that AWS indeed is free-ish, “Data Transfer from AWS Regions to the Internet is now free for up to 100 GB of data per month (up from 1 GB per region).”
“Data Transfer from Amazon CloudFront is now free for up to 1 TB of data per month (up from 50 GB), and is no longer limited to the first 12 months after signup.”
Now, I need to figure out why am I being billed each month for some of the files I use AWS for!
> I’m not yet ready to cough up the cost for Cloudflare R2 and AWS CloudFront
> but I’m still in that cheap-feeling phase and not ready to offload over 100GB of files to the public while paying a price
You wouldn't pay like anything for that on Cloudflare R2. You get 10GB and $0.015/GB (so what... like a dollar or something?) for anything over + free egress.
Yeah Ha! I saw that from this article and signed up. I even did the Card Verify thingy for $30 additional Credit. Will be trying this out and also do a comparison with Cloudflare R2.
> I even did the Card Verify thingy for $30 additional Credit.
I hadn’t heard of this, only seen the “14 day free trial” thing, so I checked: the trial gives $20 of credit, and verifying a card gets you $30 more, but it’s all trial credits which expires 14 days after you create your account. In other words, completely useless for people looking to spend under the $1/month minimum.
This is the first time I've read this but have personal experience similar. A few of my single page, gone nowhere, projects are seeing ~2k views a month. They're seeing zero traffic through google in that same period so no idea where it's coming from?
I feel like I've tried many similar combos and there ends up being some tiny, silly, trivial thing that bothers me in the end. For example, I remember fighting with one of them that forced trailing slashes, and another that didn't allow apex domains (i.e. non-www address) for static sites.
I absolutely refuse to actually ship valuable things though so thanks for the suggestion and I'll probably spend some time trying it out.
Can someone ELI5 from the experience of hosting a static site, what is the next step beyond a static CDN?
I am guessing the next step is paying for a bucket that that allows virtualized containers to run an OS? Or having a constantly-up node.js backend to generate server-side HTML? Is this essentially the generic description of self-hosting Wordpress on an own server?
Does integrating a payment processor like Shopify require something more than static hosting?
For Shopify in particular, they have a headless front-end services called Hydrogen[0] (with optional hosting called Oxygen). It's basically an opinionated wrapper around the storefront[1] and customer account[2] APIs, which allows interacting with the store from the front-end. It allows you to host Shopify on your own domain under your own control and gives a bit more customization than is available via hosted Shopify. It's what I run for the Creature Publishing site[3] and allows some extra customization for wholesale accounts, etc, without the exceptionally expensive enterprise (Shopify Plus) plan. To be completely honest, sometimes I question the decision over a simple hosted shop subdomain. Some light SSR/API calls are necessary for our setup, which is hosted on Cloudflare Pages/Workers.
There is what modern JS world calls 'SSR' (server-side rendering) which is where, yes, you basically have a node server running to generate the HTML that is sent to the browser and that's then 'hydrated' into a client-side app. Doesn't necessarily have to be Node/JS though, other languages have their own frameworks, but JS is probably most common. This setup can then be fronted by a CDN for caching purposes.
That's not really related to the bucket concept though, it just runs on a normal server and serves everything (static and dynamic content), typically.
IMO the benefits of SSR (vs SSG or a pure static-file site) are marginal _unless_ you have a very specific use case. E.g. an ecommerce site where you want all your product pages to have great SEO, but you've got too many products to build them all at once.
Then again if you _only_ need a website (i.e. no API for other clients) then it can be nice to have end-to-end types in that kind of fullstack setup.
> Does integrating a payment processor like Shopify require something more than static hosting?
I don't know about Shopify but for e.g. Stripe you can do a lot on their hosted pages, without your own backend. If you want to automate things though, have user state based on payments, etc you will need a backend and a data store of some kind. But that could be an API that your static site points to.
I agree that the initial setup is a bit complex. And at the time of writing, I could not find anything better. But once I set it up, it's quite friction-less and low maintenance so I didn't look further.
However, if you have pointer to a better solution, appreciate a link. Always looking to simplify.
Not saying you should change it if it's working, and I don't have a ready-made tutorial, but assuming you only need to serve static files I would:
(1) upload the files to an S3 bucket (GCS or Cloudflare R2 may also work, haven't tried);
(2) point Cloudflare at the bucket via their Cloud Connector;
(3) turn on Cloudflare Access.
> trifold offers an easy alternative to services like Cloudflare Pages, Netlify [...]
Does it? Those provide dynamic compute for e.g. SSR, not hosting static sites. The equivalent here is more like S3 + Cloudflare (Cloud Connector and some rules). Which is free for most use cases and (IMO) pretty easy.
Is it an easy alternative to GitHub pages? That felt pretty simple when I was looking for a solution to this exact situation. Each requires some coding knowledge, but it feels like this is a bit more work. And why do I have to pay anything?
I haven't used GitHub pages so I'm not actually sure if it provides compute or purely static file hosting, which is why I removed it from my quote.
Although it's my understanding that GitHub has much tighter content restrictions than the others. So you can't host commercial projects or anything the GitHub org finds 'icky'.
> GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS). GitHub Pages sites shouldn't be used for sensitive transactions like sending passwords or credit card numbers.
> In addition, your use of GitHub Pages is subject to the GitHub Terms of Service, including the restrictions on get-rich-quick schemes, sexually obscene content, and violent or threatening content or activity.
A lot of what the newer hosts provide is making your SPA or other JS framework app 'just work' without extra config. E.g. your build generates /index.html and the host will redirect all other paths to that file.
Also, if it's about cost then whatever cloud bucket plus CDN is going to be typically free and will scale to infinity for very cheap. Everyone dreams of a random blog post being on top of HN after all.
I suppose whether that's simpler depends on if you are familiar with the cloud offerings, but many people are through {dayjob}. For me, I'd rather use similar tooling for work and personal projects, so I don't have to think too much about it.
I throw everything I experiment with at Cloudflare, including my personal website and the family’s Internet stuff (websites, etc). None of them is commercial. Cloudflare tells me that it served 68.44 GB in the last 30 days, and the Invoice was ZERO.
I’ve been looking for an extra-cheap CDN, and I’m not so worried about high uptime. I’m not yet ready to cough up the cost for Cloudflare R2 and AWS CloudFront, though it’s not costly, but I’m still in that cheap-feeling phase and not ready to offload over 100GB of files to the public while paying a price.
I looked at Bunny CDN a while back, but I remember thinking that the minimum was like ~$50. What did I miss? I dismissed it as non-personal option.
Wait I don’t get it. CF is free for your use case, but you are looking for a cheap CDN? What’s cheaper than free?
I would hope the invoice is 0 for that amount of traffic.
AWS CloudFront is free up to 1TB bandwidth and 10 million HTTP/HTTPS requests per month.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-free-tier-data-transfer...
I’ve come past way beyond the 1st year honeymoon with AWS.
Edit:
I’m sorry but I’m today years old learning that AWS indeed is free-ish, “Data Transfer from AWS Regions to the Internet is now free for up to 100 GB of data per month (up from 1 GB per region).”
“Data Transfer from Amazon CloudFront is now free for up to 1 TB of data per month (up from 50 GB), and is no longer limited to the first 12 months after signup.”
Now, I need to figure out why am I being billed each month for some of the files I use AWS for!
The CloudFront free tier runs indefinitely.
> I’m not yet ready to cough up the cost for Cloudflare R2 and AWS CloudFront
> but I’m still in that cheap-feeling phase and not ready to offload over 100GB of files to the public while paying a price
You wouldn't pay like anything for that on Cloudflare R2. You get 10GB and $0.015/GB (so what... like a dollar or something?) for anything over + free egress.
$1 minimum for Bunny CDN. https://bunny.net/pricing/
Yeah Ha! I saw that from this article and signed up. I even did the Card Verify thingy for $30 additional Credit. Will be trying this out and also do a comparison with Cloudflare R2.
> I even did the Card Verify thingy for $30 additional Credit.
I hadn’t heard of this, only seen the “14 day free trial” thing, so I checked: the trial gives $20 of credit, and verifying a card gets you $30 more, but it’s all trial credits which expires 14 days after you create your account. In other words, completely useless for people looking to spend under the $1/month minimum.
Pity, free for 2½ years sounded good.
Cloudflare transfer is inflated. I have personal website via CF that there is no way is having transfer amounts they claim there is.
This is the first time I've read this but have personal experience similar. A few of my single page, gone nowhere, projects are seeing ~2k views a month. They're seeing zero traffic through google in that same period so no idea where it's coming from?
How recently? Because a ton of my current day traffic is LLM scraper activity.
Interesting! Do you have any suspicions as to where Cloudflare’s numbers are coming from?
FYI if you want an s3 + CF analogue setup, b2 is integrated with bunny and allows private buckets: https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-integrate-bunny...
I haven’t yet worked out the best cheap VPS/dedicated provider though, project for next weekend.
I feel like I've tried many similar combos and there ends up being some tiny, silly, trivial thing that bothers me in the end. For example, I remember fighting with one of them that forced trailing slashes, and another that didn't allow apex domains (i.e. non-www address) for static sites.
I absolutely refuse to actually ship valuable things though so thanks for the suggestion and I'll probably spend some time trying it out.
Can someone ELI5 from the experience of hosting a static site, what is the next step beyond a static CDN?
I am guessing the next step is paying for a bucket that that allows virtualized containers to run an OS? Or having a constantly-up node.js backend to generate server-side HTML? Is this essentially the generic description of self-hosting Wordpress on an own server?
Does integrating a payment processor like Shopify require something more than static hosting?
For Shopify in particular, they have a headless front-end services called Hydrogen[0] (with optional hosting called Oxygen). It's basically an opinionated wrapper around the storefront[1] and customer account[2] APIs, which allows interacting with the store from the front-end. It allows you to host Shopify on your own domain under your own control and gives a bit more customization than is available via hosted Shopify. It's what I run for the Creature Publishing site[3] and allows some extra customization for wholesale accounts, etc, without the exceptionally expensive enterprise (Shopify Plus) plan. To be completely honest, sometimes I question the decision over a simple hosted shop subdomain. Some light SSR/API calls are necessary for our setup, which is hosted on Cloudflare Pages/Workers.
[0]: https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/
[1]: https://shopify.dev/docs/api/storefront/latest
[2]: https://shopify.dev/docs/api/customer/latest
[3]: https://creaturehorror.com/
Next step in which dimension?
There is what modern JS world calls 'SSR' (server-side rendering) which is where, yes, you basically have a node server running to generate the HTML that is sent to the browser and that's then 'hydrated' into a client-side app. Doesn't necessarily have to be Node/JS though, other languages have their own frameworks, but JS is probably most common. This setup can then be fronted by a CDN for caching purposes.
That's not really related to the bucket concept though, it just runs on a normal server and serves everything (static and dynamic content), typically.
IMO the benefits of SSR (vs SSG or a pure static-file site) are marginal _unless_ you have a very specific use case. E.g. an ecommerce site where you want all your product pages to have great SEO, but you've got too many products to build them all at once.
Then again if you _only_ need a website (i.e. no API for other clients) then it can be nice to have end-to-end types in that kind of fullstack setup.
> Does integrating a payment processor like Shopify require something more than static hosting?
I don't know about Shopify but for e.g. Stripe you can do a lot on their hosted pages, without your own backend. If you want to automate things though, have user state based on payments, etc you will need a backend and a data store of some kind. But that could be an API that your static site points to.
Trifold looks simple! Also seems like a good reason to finally try out bunny.net
For anyone who might find this interesting, I wanted a static site knowledge base but private: https://chanux.me/blog/post/static-site-with-auth/
I host this with GCP and stay within free tier
And how I deploy a similar thing with GCS/Cloud build etc is covered here https://chanux.me/blog/post/automate-static-site-publishing-...
> For anyone who might find this interesting, I wanted a static site knowledge base but private: https://chanux.me/blog/post/static-site-with-auth/
This seems... incredibly complex when you could just use S3 + Cloudflare.
I agree that the initial setup is a bit complex. And at the time of writing, I could not find anything better. But once I set it up, it's quite friction-less and low maintenance so I didn't look further.
However, if you have pointer to a better solution, appreciate a link. Always looking to simplify.
Not saying you should change it if it's working, and I don't have a ready-made tutorial, but assuming you only need to serve static files I would:
[dead]
Reminder that neocities have a free tier (and an optional payed tier) - and comes with its own CDN.
https://neocities.org
> trifold offers an easy alternative to services like Cloudflare Pages, Netlify [...]
Does it? Those provide dynamic compute for e.g. SSR, not hosting static sites. The equivalent here is more like S3 + Cloudflare (Cloud Connector and some rules). Which is free for most use cases and (IMO) pretty easy.
Is it an easy alternative to GitHub pages? That felt pretty simple when I was looking for a solution to this exact situation. Each requires some coding knowledge, but it feels like this is a bit more work. And why do I have to pay anything?
I haven't used GitHub pages so I'm not actually sure if it provides compute or purely static file hosting, which is why I removed it from my quote.
Although it's my understanding that GitHub has much tighter content restrictions than the others. So you can't host commercial projects or anything the GitHub org finds 'icky'.
> So you can't host commercial projects or anything the GitHub org finds 'icky'.
I don't think that's accurate. What's your source?
https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github...
> GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS). GitHub Pages sites shouldn't be used for sensitive transactions like sending passwords or credit card numbers.
> In addition, your use of GitHub Pages is subject to the GitHub Terms of Service, including the restrictions on get-rich-quick schemes, sexually obscene content, and violent or threatening content or activity.
> sexually obscene content
Ah, so pro-diversity activism websites are out of the question for GitHub then, if not at the moment then definitely in three years time.
SSR == server-side rendering
This is pretty neat, but setups like this always make me wonder how the “static web” has become so complex?
I feel that tossing your static files up on a host like NearlyFreeSpeech (or any other cheap/decent host) is the easiest.
This would also only cost you ~$0.03 a day. Don’t reinvent the wheel, you know?
A lot of what the newer hosts provide is making your SPA or other JS framework app 'just work' without extra config. E.g. your build generates /index.html and the host will redirect all other paths to that file.
Also, if it's about cost then whatever cloud bucket plus CDN is going to be typically free and will scale to infinity for very cheap. Everyone dreams of a random blog post being on top of HN after all.
I suppose whether that's simpler depends on if you are familiar with the cloud offerings, but many people are through {dayjob}. For me, I'd rather use similar tooling for work and personal projects, so I don't have to think too much about it.