Cloudflare is my 2026 recommendation for personal and SMB projects
Lately, I’ve been ramping up a few personal projects and, without even realizing it, building a serious relationship with Cloudflare.
For a long time I thought of Cloudflare strictly as a CDN - making workloads faster, adding a layer of security, just the basics. But recently, I’ve been migrating different projects over to their platform, and boy, I wish I had done this sooner!
As with any major tech platform, there are still a ton of features I haven’t even touched yet (and I’m sure I’ll explore at some point). But based on what I’ve used so far, here are a few reasons why I’d recommend Cloudflare to just about anyone.
The Classic CDN Cloudflare is famous for being a stellar content delivery network, caching sites closer to where your users actually are to improve speed and the overall experience. And yes, it’s completely free.
A Genuinely Great UI If you’ve dabbled in Google Cloud Platform or AWS, it feels like there are a million services and options, and navigating those consoles can be incredibly overwhelming. I’m not exactly sure how Cloudflare cracked it, but I’ve always been able to move around their dashboard without feeling lost.
Cheaper Domains! I honestly thought AWS (where I’ve kept most of my registered domains for years) was the cheapest option out there… well, no. so much for feeling clever. Check out Cloudflare’s pricing - you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Free Email Routing I have a few parked domains not in use, and setting up an email service for these seems overkill. Cloudflare has a super simple simple setup to create an email address with your domain and route them into my inbox. No need to do an alias in Google Workspace or set something up. You won’t be able to send emails from the email on the free tier, but definitely worth a look.
Free Security Certificates I hear some people out there are still paying and/or manually configuring their SSL certs. Yes, yes, I know complex setups sometimes require custom configurations, but for the vast majority of us? Having this handled automatically as a basic feature for any domain running through Cloudflare is just awesome.
Zero-Trust Security I have some projects that I want to keep online but strictly private. I guess I could have asked an AI to help me code a custom PIN or login system, but Cloudflare has a generous free tier for Zero Trust. You can easily configure an authentication screen in front of anything published through the platform.
Really, I should’ve made the move a long time ago.