Breaking the Shackles of Standard Web Hosting!
I recently had the kind of lesson that only comes after getting an unexpected renewal charge. You know the type - the kind that makes you start cursing out loud, pacing around the room talking to yourself, and annoying anyone in a ten-foot radius by telling them the exact same story on repeat. It’s the classic trap so many of us fall for: a decent deal that quietly renews at an absolutely crazy rate.
In my case, the new bill was a bill for over $200 for a year of web hosting. What?! What a sucker. (In fairness, I was on a completely unnecessary plan, and they did send an email warning me that they were changing the tiers. I just failed to notice my rate was about to jump by nearly 100%.)
The culprit: OVHCloud . The exact same day that bill hit, I reached out to tech support to see if I could just downgrade. The answer, of course, was no. I could cancel my plan without a refund, AND would need to manually export everything and re-import it all to the new plan myself.
I have never been so mad at myself for being “that guy.” What. A.
Revenge Mode
But from the ashes rises the phoenix—namely, this newly improved blog.
This ridiculous bill coincided with me advancing some personal projects on Cloudflare. I’ve been really falling for their ecosystem over the last few weeks, so I started digging. Enter Cloudflare Pages and Workers into my life.
A way to host a content site entirely on Cloudflare’s free tier! Where has this been all my life? I know where I was: paying for legacy hosting like a complete noob (no offense to the majority of people out there still doing it).
Finding out about this free tier made me even angrier about the $200 I just dropped. But it also lit a fire under me to properly learn how headless websites work and to explore the modern tools available to build them.
As it turns out, they are significantly faster and infinitely more secure. I write about it on this post.
This is a real thing, folks. Later this year, I’ll write a proper deep dive into my setup, but the short version is that it’s essentially GitHub hooked up to Cloudflare, with a few tools tying it all together.
I managed to customize my entire layout by bouncing between various LLMs (maxing out my quotas one by one), and boom—my new digital home base was live.
I am beyond happy that I no longer have to care about traditional hosting. And since I don’t want to keep bugging my family by ranting about this wonderful realization, I thought I’d share it here :)