I've been using Cloudflare free in front of App Engine's free tier for a few years and it really seems too good to be true. I can go viral and scale to infinity, for exactly $0.
The other day one of the commenters under a post wanted to spend $20 per month to host a static website to handle HN traffic, I just LOL’d. I tried to be good and explain why it was so unnecessary but nah they would rather bring a canon to a water gun fight.
Or a fully static host, like Netlify, Firebase Hosting, CloudFlare Pages, etc. which have extremely generous free tiers. I got twice to top ~15 of the HN front page, including once briefly at #1, within a month ( the billing period) and got to only ~90% of my bandwidth allowance of the Firebase Hosting free tier ( which isn't the most generous one).
Not only is it cheaper, it's also with less hassle ( there's nothing to manage, you just send static HTML / code to build to static HTML).
Sure. Or a full cloud instance running on a free tier somewhere. There are tons of ways to host low traffic sites for free that can be made to scale to high traffic for free by slapping Cloudflare in front. As long as your site is mostly static.
In my case, I'm serving data that updates every 10 minutes but is otherwise identical for every user. Cloudflare handles that use case perfectly.
Yep pretty amazing what CF makes possible combined with free tiers of other services. That hadn’t quite clicked in my head until I read your comment. Thank you.
