At the time of writing, my personal website (along with a few other applications) has been running in a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster for about a year, which I am now officially sick of maintaining. Having a cheap Kubernetes cluster for learning purposes is great, but hosting my website there means it needs to be maintained, which I now realise is more time consuming than I would like.

It was time to look for a new hosting solution.

Requirements

My list of demands for the a new hosting solution was short:

• CDN
• Cheap, but preferrably free
• Little to no maintenance

Cloudflare pages

Regardless of one’s opinion on whether a massive global entity MITM’ing majority of the internet is a good or a bad thing, it’s hard to compete with the plethora of benefits using Cloudflare brings you out of the box.
Not only will they provide DNS management and a TLS certificate, but their edge-network can be leveraged for hosting a static (or dynamic if you include workers) website.

All of this is free of charge.

Cloudflare recently they rolled out Cloudflare pages, a service designed especially for hosting JAMstack websites. You can go read the marketing blurb yourself, but for the purposes of this post you can think of it as a the Cloudflare’s interpetation of Vercel.

Cloudflare pages includes built-in “GitOps” capabilities, but after watching the automation fail to compile my website, using a framework it claimed to support (Hugo), I surmised it would probably be easier to just upload the static file bundle directly using Wrangler and Github Actions:

jobs:
  Build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      
      - name: Hugo init
        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
        with:
          hugo-version: '0.101.0'
          extended: true
      
      - name: Compile static bundle
        run: hugo --minify -d ${{ env.BUILD_NAME }}
      
      - name: Deploy bundle
        uses: cloudflare/[email protected]
        with:
          accountId: ${{ secrets.CF_ACCOUNT_ID }}
          apiToken: ${{ secrets.CF_API_TOKEN }}
          command: pages publish ${{ env.BUILD_NAME }} --project-name=${{ env.PROJECT_NAME }}

Conclusions

I can now render my Kubernetes cluster inoperable with all sorts of moronic experiments, but this website will remain available, because it’s served from the fastest edge-network in the world, free of charge.