Hello Cloudflare ☁️
Cloudfront offers a free tier (1TB per month). I actually went to the Connect Cloudflare convention held in Sydney and there were many talks emphasising on security and deploying on the edge with many talks from reputable companies such as Safety Culture and Atlassian. It seems like Cloudflare is quite up to date you could say in the tech space. This page uses one of their service called Cloudflare pages which allows us to host my static Astro frontend (this website).
The main advantage with using Cloudflare is as follows
- Speed - reduction of load times due to edge node deployment and also its global CDN. It also does caching, load balancing
- Security - Robust and up to date security including DDoS protection (in the free tier), secure SSL
- Easy Setup - As this site will show, the process is super easy!
- Free forever - So cloudflare is free forever (seems like a loss leader strategy on trying to make us use their other services - but still I like free stuff). Apparently if you do choose to scale there is obviously a paid portion which apparently is good.
How to host a static website (explained simply)
- Create a website using a Framework. I am currently using Astro (one of my favourite frameworks for quick static websites). To make life easier (but not necessary to do) choosing from these list of frameworks for easy integration. Technically you can just provide a html/css/javascript file and that works as well!
- Once you have created your website. Make sure to upload it to a git repo
- Create a new cloudflare page, and choose the step to link your Github
- Choose your project and make sure to slect the Framework in the preset section that you used.
- Click deploy and it really is that easy! Of course things can get more complicated if you have environment variables to pass in.
- Next we have to make sure to connect it to a specific domain. I purchased this domain previously using vercel