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.