Chris WiegmanLast week, less than two weeks after re-launching this site on Hugo and Netlify, I’ve switched hosts again. This time to Cloudflare Pages. So far, at least for the moment, I’m pretty happy with the results.
Why Leave Netlify?
So why leave Netlify so soon? The answer was simple: it was having some issues serving the site and, after only a week, I was already running into some of the limits of its free plan.
While it seemed like the service was fast and appropriate for this site, my email suggested otherwise. In just over a week I had 34 messages of folks reporting problems loading some or all the pages on my site.
In 6 years of hosting this site on WP Engine with WordPress I never received a single complaint of it being down. It was clear something was wrong.
Add to that Netlify’s free plan has a limit on bandwidth and bills. In a week this site went through a good portion of the free bandwidth and over 1/2 the build minutes (the latter because I’m still tweaking and updating so many pieces of the site). In other situations I think I would’ve looked for answers within Netlify but, given I was on the free plan anyway, I decided to look for an alternative instead.
Why Cloudflare Pages
I spent much of last week looking for an alternative to Netlify. I looked at Vercel, DigitalOcean and a few others but eventually settled on Cloudflare for a few reasons.
- I know it from other projects and know it works quite well
- It’s free plan gives me more than Netlify’s did
- It offers room for me to grow this site and others
- It’s big enough that I know it will still be there in a year (something I’m not so sure about with many web hosts, particularly those over-leveraged on WordPress)
Cloudflare has its issues. There’s no doubt about that. For the moment, though, it also is exactly what I needed for a host for this site. Since moving over to it on Friday I haven’t seen a single further message about my site having issues either. For now I’ll call that a win.
We’ll see what tomorrow brings. At least I no longer require anything “fancy” in a host as it only needs to serve basic html and image files.