No I didn’t miss the point, $20 is weeks worth of meal in majority of countries. People from those countries run successful blogs without paying a penny to cloudlfare. I serve much more than 2GB per month without all that on a dynamic site. Paying cloudlfare for that is like putting a tarp over a dumpster fire to quickly hide it. I would rather think why my static site fails like shit when it doesn’t even need server side processing and correct it. I’m not saying cloudflare/CDN is useless, it shines when you are serving huge assets every hour to lot of people globally, or want to secure from bot traffic, or other useful features it provides. Heck you could even host a static site on s3 or netlify for free and answer all the traffic in the world. Remember Google returned subsecond results much before cloudflare or global CDNs were in place.
One variable you miss is the price of your own time.
To pay USD $20 and unload a problem to some 3rd party service takes under 30min, while running a scalable, high performance web-server on low budget is hard and time consuming - even impossible for devs with no sufficient devops/admin skills, which is sadly a majority.
Back in the day, as a student with no money and a time to spare I used to do it all myself too, guerrilla style. Nowadays tinkering with my private servers would mean taking time from my real job, and that just doesn't make sense financially, my time is way more valuable and scarce now.
That's why we have the economy of specialists in the first place. One can do everything in DIY fashion, but in our civilization it's usually cheaper to hire a plumber's or carpenter's services than to invest in learning the skills, buying the tools and then doing it, if it's not your primary source of income. It's no different with CDN services.
I never spent any other time other than the initial deployment. Like I said if your tap is leaking find a competent plumber or if you have the skill fix the leak, don’t pay for water tanker every time you are out of water. Im not sure why you need high performance, scalable multisharded and other big cloud tech to run a static site. Im not against using cloudlfare, there is a usecase for it. I cant stress more about why cloudflare is such an overkill for static sites. A cheap VPS can go a long way before you have to start worrying about not being able to serve traffic for a static site, its not a blocking call. We would be wasting unnecessary resources, if we don’t fix the actual problem.
My site never failed thats the thing without paying $20. And many developers can actually do it too. If you can’t serve decent traffic for a static site, I would rather fix the leaking tap once and for all than wasting money on a water tanker every time I am out of water.
What does the $20 buy vs free plan? During a spike I was able to handle 30k pageviews per hour with Cloudflare free plan + $40 vps. Pretty much all pageviews were cached by Cloudflare and didn't hit my server. How does the $20 plan help?
Makes sense, thats what I mean too. There is a use case for CDNs which do no make sense to pay for if its a static site. Which can be done much cheaper and for free most of the time. Unless you are running a google scale static site.
Interpreting ‘weeks’ as 2 weeks, the GDP necessary to call that weeks worth of meals is $520 dollars. There’s only like 6 countries with a GDP that low.
If you are only talking about food, it may stretch a bit further, but you’re still far away from the majority of countries.
