They don’t recommend it, but you can front a Netlify site with Cloudflare—including putting the cf origin cert into Netlify. I do this for my website.
You just add the domain to the site in Netlify, but then set up the hosts as CNAME in cf pointing at the codenamed Netlify hostname for the site.
I’m on the cf free plan, and the whole setup works great.
Cloudflare could probably take the whole stack though if they gave me a simple tool to upload a directory of files to them.
(I stopped using Netlify for builds when I started moving my repos off of GitHub due to GitHub’s collaboration with ICE, and Netlify only supports the major git services for autobuilds. I self-host my repos with Gitea now, so I have to build on my Drone server and just use the Netlify CLI in the last CI step to upload the built site.)
Technically there is not a limit of 30 sites, but rather of 30 deployed worker scripts. With a little JavaScript editing, you can create a single worker script that is able to serve an unlimited number of sites (by including the hostname in the KV key).
Kentonv, how does CloudFlare manage to offer free cdn when google cloud and other providers charge a ton for bandwidth. What are your limits? How are you still making money in the millions of sites that use free CloudFlare cdn ?
Because internet architecture is based around transit capacity, not usage. You buy capacity like 10gbit/sec lines to interconnect with and Cloudflare has enough bandwidth to easily support their free customers and upsell on other features.
Remember they are also a security service with DDOS protection and that requires high bandwidth anyway. Other CDNs don't charge for bandwidth but rather for bytes-used, which is just more profitable, especially if you don't have a lot of other features to charge for.
I'm surprised that more CDNs don't try to compete with CF on this but apparently that's just how they want to operate.
The product and engineering challenges involved in building out our network such that it is both performant and cost-effective to operate are fascinating.
The easiest way to learn the answer to this sort of question is to come work at Cloudflare :)
You just add the domain to the site in Netlify, but then set up the hosts as CNAME in cf pointing at the codenamed Netlify hostname for the site.
I’m on the cf free plan, and the whole setup works great.
Cloudflare could probably take the whole stack though if they gave me a simple tool to upload a directory of files to them.
(I stopped using Netlify for builds when I started moving my repos off of GitHub due to GitHub’s collaboration with ICE, and Netlify only supports the major git services for autobuilds. I self-host my repos with Gitea now, so I have to build on my Drone server and just use the Netlify CLI in the last CI step to upload the built site.)