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Given that this uses multiple Cloudflare services, is anyone very familiar with their pricing? The readme lists a "generous free tier", but I always have to wonder what happens once you fall outside of that tier. I remember that R2 is cheap (one of its distinguishing features), but wonder if any of the other services suddenly become $50 a month or something.
Cloudflare's free tiers are hard-free; they stop working if you exceed the free tier usage (at least for compute; storage is different).
Pages is essentially totally free. R2 is within the same pricing magnitude as S3. D1 is a very new product and afaik is still in beta and doesn't have production pricing yet; so be weary there. Zero Trust is less usage and more per-user, I think $7/mo/user.
> be weary
I've seen this mistake three or four times recently, and it's starting to make me wonder why I keep seeing it so often now, when I didn't before. "Wary" (like "beware") means "cautious"; "weary" (like to "wear" someone out) means "tired."
R2 storage might be within the same order of magnitude as S3, but once you start serving content to users, it becomes many orders of magnitude cheaper.
op here.
I've been looking for affordable hosting solution to serve multimedia files, e.g., podcast audio, which is typically the biggest part of cost for hosting.
Cloudflare R2 is an attractive solution. R2 doesn't have egress fee and the free tier includes 10 million read requests/month [1]. Is 10 million a big number? Yes, at least in the podcast industry. If your podcast has 10 million listens per month (or let's be conservative, "only" 1 million listens/month), you could already make big money [2] while still in the free tier of R2! In other words, whenever you'll pay for R2, then you become a very successfully podcaster :)
For other Cloudflare products that we use in microfeed
* Zero Trust (provides logins to admin page) [3]: 50 users for free - how many admins do you need? 50 users enough? :)
* Pages [4]: 100,000 functions requests/month for free. This should be enough for personal/small-business type websites.
* D1 [5]: No pricing info yet. But they'll likely charge by # of reqs/month.
* CDN / Firewall / Cache / DNS etc.: there are other Cloudflare products you can use for free.
Probably the biggest price you'll pay when using microfeed is your time :)
There are (almost) one-click SaaS solutions that save you time, but you'll pay with money.
There are multiple-click self-managed solutions that save you money, but you'll pay with time.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/platform/pricing/
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+downloads+does+a+po...
[3] https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/zero-trust-services/
It seems there is a growing movement of headless CMSs, but I am afraid of vendor lock-in with Cloudflare and the like.
Are there any other CMS's that people are using these days? Perhaps looking forward to be using in 2023?
Strapi[0] is great and Payload[1] also looks promising.
Forestry has been on my radar for a long time but never had a need to use it https://forestry.io/
The big draw for me is it's just Hugo/Gatsby/Jekyll underneath, and the output files can be delivered anywhere that will host static files (CloudFlare pages does this really well, as does Netlify).
Any new name in town? My perception is that 2022 is pretty much web2 stagnation due to a lot of things.
Directus (https://directus.io)
One you might check on is CloudCannon (https://www.cloudcannon.com).
This looks fantastic. I just started a podcast and was planning to test publishing with cloudflare since it seems much cheaper than the alternatives (and planning to backup to storj).
I will try this out this week!
Why mix the type of software (A CMS for certain use cases) with the distribution mechanism (Cloudflare Pages etc)?
Shouldn't that be two seperate issues?
My guess would be:
Traditional CMS you do the setup and plumbing in the server because you have full control
Static website hosting you prebuild a website and push it up all complied and done but in a standard supported format, do it easily can go to different providers.
There's not much in between, because you can't (easily) write code that is happy to run in two different systems controlled by other people with different plumbing under the hood... It's certainly doable, but the more you generalize the more complicated your code gets... and the less you can benefit from the vendor specific stuff (e.g. removing features that one side does not support ... Or adding code to use it if it's there -- which makes code even more complicated)...
Edit: and to the point of code complexity: if you did this all yourself in an alpha release, you likely would make a company/product like forestry (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion) because you've made something some people would consider somewhat or very valuable
I use middleman[^1] + bulmaCSS + FontAwesome but host on github using the `github.io` domain and upload podcasts to "archive.org"[^2]. I choose this setup to make sure content will survive as much as possible.
ps. You might want to consider a donation to the internet archive, see [^2] - no affiliation, just a happy user.
[^1]: https://middlemanapp.com/
[^2]: https://archive.org/
Nice setup! I've been following Vercel and Cloudflare trying to sync up their v8 isolates runtime: CF is going to be a great option for running these "Edge Style" React apps once stuff stabilizes.
Super cool. Thanks for sharing, going to set this up over the weekend!
Seems very nice! Looking forward to have something like Supabase or Pocketbase deployed directly on Cloudflare! fingers crossed
Such a thing exists
https://github.com/subzerocloud/showcase/tree/main/cloudflar...
Very cool! I like how there is a nice visual editor. I hate using markdown for blogging.
I just use PicoCMS and upload my markdown files through FTP. I don't think there's anything out there that can compete with the simplicity of this solution, not even static site generators.
It uses templates with Twig, and it's very simple PHP so you can host it anywhere.
I once hit the frontpage of a big aggregator from my country and it handled like it was nothing from a very cheap shared hosting.
From my Linux Mint laptop, all it takes is to open my FTP on Thunar (which involves a click in my sidebar), and I'm navigating it like any other file system. Right click, create file, write & format my post, and save the file.
Viola, it's published.
Oh, and you can mix Markdown with HTML and JS in your posts. Less stuff you need to learn.
There are different definitions of simple. I found wordpress simple because I could access the UI to post from any device. I could upload images, save drafts, and preview posts. My static site, basically requires a desktop/laptop PC and to preview I have to build the site. This is far less simple to use even if it's simpler to run
I would argue that using something like Nuxt/Content[0]is even simpler. I create a new markdown file in my website’s local repo, write the content and commit if it’s ready for publishing. No need for the FTP step and version control is build in.
This setup is also completely free since the content lives on GitHub and my static site on render.com (but any static site hosting will work).
And since it’s Nuxt based, it automatically also supports more advanced features such as tagging, advanced queries and filtering.
Can only recommend it!
The hardest part to me, is install PHP.
What is good solution for hosting a domain anonymously? I want to start blogging but don’t want to do a personal one just yet. I mean anonymous in lightweight general sense, not political activist super security.
is picocms still a static site? cms like drupal,wordpress can control content access with password,which is where cms stands out.
"Self-hosted on Cloudflare" feels like an oxymoron. I know it's common for people to consider hosting on VPS and the like to be self-hosting, but attached to proprietary services seems to be a step further, I think something being portable between providers has to be a minimum for the term.
I like the idea of having web content you can put up with minimal configuration and cost but we have to draw a line for that definition somewhere.
How is it self hosted and hosted cloudflare at the same time ?
You host it on your own Cloudflare account.
"Self hosted" and "serverless Cloudflare" each have their attractions, but they are contradicting terms, unless I'm confused.
Running it on cloudflare by provisioning it yourself instead of using something dedicated like wordpress or contentful.
This isn't directly related to the post, but it's a CMS related question: does anybody know of a simple "static file" CMS that also lets you deploy server side javascript functions? It's a weird use case, so I suspect there may not be. I've solved it by using a static site generator and a nginx reverse proxy to a node server - but it's a lot of complexity for my use case (using stripe to sell stuff, but stripe checkout requires server side session creation).
Edit: Netlify Edge functions seems to be pretty much exactly what I'm describing (drop js/ts files in a directory, deploy with your static site). The only problem with it for me is it's not self-hosted. Serveless functions would work, tho the separate deployment adds a layer of complexity, and I'd have to learn CORS finally lol
Cloudflare Pages works well as a serverless option for this, and without the separate deployment for functions, so no CORS required. Couldn't recommend more.
Netlify? Edge functions and functions may be what you're after
Not exactly what you asked for, but if you use S3 + CloudFront, you can use javascript functions in CloudFront that can modify the request to/from the client & to/from the S3 bucket. Does things like URL redirects, header manipulation, auth... I use it to redirect ~/path/to/item/ to ~/path/to/item/index.html for my static site.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...
Isn't this what serverless functions are for? Vercel, Netlify, Firebase would suit your needs.
Please don't use this unless you wish to exclude those who would like
to enjoy your content but also respect their privacy. Cloudflare
continue to block Tor traffic by default. It is discriminatory against
innocent users and harmful to freedom of speech (because speech also
requires the ability to listen).
There's also a centralization issue too. Remember when Cloudflare went down a few months ago and like 30% of the internet went dark? Letting one company control this much of the internet is bad.
Are they blocking you outright or are you required to do captchas?
From a 2016 post CloudFlare states they don’t block Tor traffic and don’t let their customers block the traffic either but they will put restrictions such as captchas in place [1].
I use bearblog.dev, super minimalistic, markdown first, customizable...not self hosted but.. nice overall!