Comment by nindalf
1 day ago
I’ve used Astro on Cloudflare for a few years for my personal website (username.com). They’ve both been absolutely fantastic, I can’t say enough good things about both of them. My website has all 100s on PageSpeed/Lighthouse, and that’s because of the performance focus of both Astro and Cloudflare. No credit to me at all. It was mainly because Astro prioritised shipping 0 JS unless it was absolutely necessary and Cloudflare is exceedingly good at serving static HTML.
But I also see the difficulty that Astro faced here. Despite being happy with the framework, I never paid for it. The paid offerings didn’t strike a chord with me. And it was partly because whatever they offered, Cloudflare already offered on a very generous free tier.
I'm glad the team have got a second life within Cloudflare,. I'm happy for the people who've given me such excellent software for free for years. Thanks folks!
Out of curiosity, how do you become ‘exceedingly good’ at serving static HTML?
By all accounts, they’ve centralised the delivery of this static HTML at several layers of the network stack, and you’re not getting static HTML anymore because some other part of the business fucked it up.
The World Wide Web was serving static HTML for decades before Cloudflare came along. Open an FTP client, drag and drop, and boom - new HTMl is served.
When we talk static HTML I think that still includes images, stylesheets and potentially even very basic javascript (e.g. setting classes). Those take advantage of CDNs; Cloudflare have an extensive CDN with decent latency / locations. They also are a DNS registrar and a lot of people use them for their local DNS provider so again latency benefits. That's before we talk about the DDoS protection, injecting stuff like metrics etc etc. I don't want to sound like a Cloudflare rep here but I can see where this user is coming from.
If everything is static, they'll cache it in a DC close to you. That's better than what we had before.
Likewise! I built my personal blog with Astro and host on Cloudflare (username.dev), and feel guilty about taking advantage of such excellent software and free tier. Here’s hoping they find a way to take my money soon.
I'm in the same boat as you. I've built a personal home page with Astro and hosted it on Cloudflare. It has been really cheap, only paying for worker subscription at 5 dollars per month. The site has been running non-stop essentially without downtime. And as you say the user experience of Astro's static HTML, css and minimal JS output on Cloudflare edge CDN network is really good.
But with the events of the world being what they are I have been considering moving my Astro page to BunnyCDN and thus Europe (where I live). The only Cloudflare specific feature I've used is D1 database so migrating now shouldn't be too difficult. I really hope Cloudflare does not make it difficult to use Astro on other providers, either intentionally or by accident. Next.js for a long time was essentially a framework that only ran great on Vercel, and using other providers was asking to become a second citizen. I believe it is somewhat better now with proper provider plugin system, but still.
Astro has been great and I understand they need to find a way to economically sustain their business. Joining a big company like Cloudflare is one way to do that. I can't complain too much never having opted to use Astro's commercial offerings. So I only hope they keep Astro open. I'm building a new product on top of Astro now and would hate to see it become a Cloudflare-only product.
Congratulations to the Astro team!
I appreciate your honest testimonial. It's so rare these days to read a sentence like, "No credit to me at all" haha
amazing performance.