While looking for a free web host for my new blog, I did a bit of research and very quickly found Netlify and CloudFlare as the top choices. I was certain that one of them would suit my needs, so I stopped the research and proceeded to evaluate just those two. In this post I give a summary of my experience evaluating them and I explain my eventual choice.

Disclaimer: This evaluation examines the suitability of Netlify vs. CloudFlare for the purpose of hosting a static web site, and specifically a personal blog, under a free plan. If what you want to do deviates even slightly from this stated purpose, then this evaluation may be irrelevant to you, perhaps even misleading.

Netlify

I decided to begin with Netlify, since it is a much smaller operation than CloudFlare, and it is in my character to (at least try to) avoid companies that are so big that they smell like monopolies. If Netlify would work for me, I would not even have to try CloudFlare. After all, let us not forget that the small(er) guy tends to have to do a bit better and deliver something extra in order to stay competitive, so it often happens that there is actual benefit, and not just moral justification, in choosing the small(er) guy.

Netlify was relatively easy to register with and configure it to pull my static web site from GitHub. This is not to say that the interface of their web site is small and simple; on the contrary, it is unbelievably extensive and preposterously complicated; but it is significantly less complex than CloudFlare. (More on that later.) As a bonus point, their website worked without any issues using FireFox.

Here is the problem with Netlify:

Each time I make a change to my blog, no matter how small, and I push that change to GitHub, Netlify has to do this mysterious thing they call a "build".

For a dynamic web site, with a front-end and a back-end, and actual code running at the back-end, there could conceivably be a need for something that might deserve to be called a "build"; but for a static web site, consisting only of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, a "build" is not just unnecessary; it is inapplicable as a notion. All they would need to do is pull from my GitHub repository into a directory that is being served by their web servers, and my change would be on air; but no, they insist on doing a "build", because apparently that's how we like to waste computing resources nowadays.

Now, it is their computing resources, so I could dismiss it as something that I just do not need to care about, but here is the problem:

They count this "build" against the quota of my free hosting plan. A Netlify "build" costs a whole 15 credits, but the free hosting plan comes with only 300 credits per month, so I can only push changes to my static web site 20 times in a month, even if each time the change is as small as adding a dot to an i.

Well, sorry folks, but that just ain't gonna work. The allowed number of updates per month is so low that it is not just a matter of quota anxiety; it is simply unworkable. On a day that I publish a new blog post I may push 20 times within a single day. Most of those pushes are less than a kilobyte worth of data, (some may literally be putting a dot on an i,) so they should count as nothing, but Netlify makes such a big deal out of them, that their free plan becomes unusable. As the Greek expression goes, δώρον άδωρον: a gift that is no gift.

So, I had to give CloudFlare a try.

CloudFlare

Cloudflare is a much bigger company than Netlify; In fact, CloudFlare is so big, that I would not be surprised to learn one day that Netlify runs on CloudFlare infrastructure.

The experience of registering with CloudFlare and setting it up to pull my static web site from GitHub was significantly more unpleasant than with Netlify. I did not think that was possible, but apparently, it is: their web site is even more preposterously complicated than Netlify. Finding the options page you want to navigate to is frustratingly difficult, just a notch short of impossible.

At some point during the process, (right after granting them access to my GitHub repository,) CloudFlare seemed to get stuck; the option to proceed to the next page was simply not there. I tried restarting the process from the beginning, I tried with or without cookies, with or without Dark Reader, but to no avail. Then finally I tried with a chromium-based browser, and it worked. So, apparently they do something so arcane in there, that they manage to be incompatible with FireFox.

CloudFlare also likes to babble about something they call a "build", so they also keep flummoxing me with "build settings" and "build commands" and "build output directories", which are all completely irrelevant and annoying to me, because all I am trying to do is publish a static website. I understand that there may be technical reasons due to which they may have to do stuff under the hood to make the magic happen, and they may be calling that stuff "build", but I do not get to see that stuff, and I have no reason to care about that stuff, so they should keep that stuff transparent to me. (I get it, they don't make their money from static web sites, so people like me are irrelevant to them.)

Luckily, unlike Netlify, CloudFlare does not use the "build" nonsense as a pretense to severely limit the availability of their free plan to me. Here are my preliminary findings about CloudFlare:

Each time I make a change to my blog content and push to GitHub, CloudFlare pulls from GitHub and publishes my changes; when they do that, they charge me with one "worker build minute". This "worker build minute" is some ridiculous intended-to-sound-technical but actually meaningless jargon that they have pulled out of their nose, and is essentially equivalent to what Netlify simply calls a "credit", which is what I will also call it here. (The term "credit" is at least honest about the fact that it too, has been pulled out of someone's nose.)

Well, CloudFlare's free plan gives me 3000 such credits per month, which means that I can push changes to my static web site 3000 times a month. That is 150 times more than Netlify, and enough to not only cover my needs, but also to spare me from quota anxiety.

I think this settles it.

My blog will stay on Netlify for a little while longer, so that I can watch them side by side for a while to see if anything else pops up, and if all goes well, I will be switching from Netlify to CloudFlare at some point in the near future.