Why I Migrated to CloudFlare

January 14, 2024

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How did we even end up here?

I’ve been hosting this site, my resume and my side project (now dead 💀) on AWS for the 5-6 years. I was happy with everything until Google Domains announced it was shutting down. Luckily, I was already working on rebuilding the site and migrating everything to Astro 🚀.

Google Domains

With the shutdown I was able to transfer my .org to AWS, but I was unable to do so for this .dev, as AWS does not support it.

While looking for other solutions, because I did not want Squarespace as my registrar.

Perhaps this is presumptuous, but I assume the driver for acquisition here was the client list they would gain. I do not need to be marketed to by Squarespace for their website builder.

I found out CloudFlare is a registrar for .dev and started investigating it more deeply and discovered CloudFlare Pages.

It just works…

I had completely forgotten when building this blog that I was using bun for snappy local dev. When I hooked up the git repo to CF pages’ CD system it automatically detected I was using bun, built, and deployed this site 🤯.

Analytics

Maybe this is controversial (or not), but Google Analytics 4 made it hard to do the simple things that GA once made simple, like understanding how many people viewed a page. Then there’s the whole intrusiveness of Google Analytics and it basically requiring you to put up a GDPR and CCPA banner to use it. CloudFlare Analytics are non-intrusive and give me the simple metrics in an easy to understand user interface.

Additionally, CloudFlare Analytics is very developer friendly. I was able to build the page view functionality for this site using their GraphQL API. No need to stand up my own database, the only extra infrastructure is the Cloudflare Worker that renders the page.

Edit: 08/23/2024 - Shortly after implementing CloudFlare analytics they changed their API and policies. I’ve since migrated to SimpleAnalytics, a privacy first analytics tracker focused on transparency. They have a generous free tier that is now serving the site over CloudFlare analytics. SimpleAnalytics is extremely developer friendly offering a very straight forward REST API to query your analytics in depth.