--- date: '2025-08-04' description: And maybe you should, or shouldn't. id: cf modified: 2026-06-06 00:12:35 GMT-04:00 socials: hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44791222 twitter: https://x.com/aarnphm/status/1952474293654413636 tags: - technical title: Moving to Cloudflare created: '2025-08-04' published: '2025-08-04' pageLayout: default slug: posts/cf permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/posts/cf.md generator: quartz: v4.6.0 hostedProvider: Cloudflare baseUrl: aarnphm.xyz full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt --- > Preface: I just want to say that I absolutely adore the Vercel team and love everything they have been working on so far. > But Cloudflare is based (just see their recent [blog catalog](https://blog.cloudflare.com/), and the main thing that sold me on Cloudflare was [Quicksilver](https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-quicksilver-configuration-distribution-at-internet-scale/), but enough glaze šŸ˜…) > > Also Iā€™m not a frontend engineer by trade, so Iā€™m not going into too much details about the benefits between these providers for specific frameworks. So I want you, > the reader to treat this from a perspective of a consumer, who enjoy writing somewhat fruitful static files on his weekend. šŸ™‚ I finally found some pockets of time over the last two weekends slowly migrating all of [[/|this]] site infrastructure to Cloudflare. I would want to say so far, the experience has been nothing but great. Previously, this site were being run with a mixed between Vercel (functions) and Cloudflare (Domains and DNS), which in turn has caused me a lot of friction for prototyping/adding new features I want to build. This post will demonstrate what I enjoy about using both and what both providers can improve, and will explain the decision behind going with Cloudflare versus other alternatives. ## ā€genealogyā€ of the sites This website is entirely built with a customised version of [Quartz](https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/) (you can find more details [[thoughts/craft#^quartz|here]]): - [812ac42](https://github.com/aarnphm/aarnphm.github.io/commit/812ac42097844bd0470b1b7fbb7ac6ed66e772e6): I first open-source this implementations, requested by a few friends - Hosted with GitHub Pages, DNS managed by [gen.xyz](https://gen.xyz/) - Vercel Functions for [[/curius|curius feed]], arXiV popover, and code rendering - This is functional, but rather pretty slow, given that there are a few round-trip needed to be done between GitHub Pages and Vercel - [ce7bcee](https://github.com/aarnphm/aarnphm.github.io/commit/ce7bcee77f7e2e6e4b688c831201fadc9cd2d18b): The first initial version of prototyping [Andy Matuschakā€™s notes](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes) with Quartz - [jackyzha0/quartz#128](https://github.com/jackyzha0/quartz/issues/128) requests for a view with default Quartz - Added Vercel Middleware to redirect DNS - Given that [notes.aarnphm.xyz](https://notes.aarnphm.xyz) and [aarnphm.xyz](https://aarnphm.xyz) points to the same source, I end up having to setup build process on Vercel similar to GitHub Pages. - Which ends up having two copies of the exact same sites over two different cloud buckets! > Retrospectively, I could have moved all over to Vercel at this point, but I was trying to skim through the free offering from both providers. - At some point along the way, I had exceed the limits for GitHub LFS Free tier. - I was tempted to just add more storages, but it is pretty expensive (ik \$10 is 2 cups of coffee, but if you can do it for free, why not) - Found and contains setup for your own Git LFS with Cloudflare R2 - Cloudflare is relatively generous with their quotas and storages for [free tier](https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/lp/pg-r2-comparison-2) - I did a quick comparison with [Vercel Blob](https://vercel.com/docs/vercel-blob/usage-and-pricing). However, the pricing seems to be a bit more on the expensive side. - For the tasks that I want to achieve (which is current hosting PDFs), Cloudflare is a better choice here - Moved all DNS, domain to Cloudflare, and migrated to Cloudflare [Pages](https://pages.cloudflare.com/) - I was also considering to use Vercel DNS, but given that I have already been on R2 at this point, it seems prudent to use Cloudflare for the sake of simplicity - Lee Rob from Vercel reached out for [feedback](https://x.com/aarnphm/status/1882982597908955548?s=46\&t=K6_tWk-1vuN4JVbmPrSC7A), so Iā€™m indeed bullish on Vercel on their care/dedications to their customers. - Their free tier encapsulates pretty much all features I would ever needed, for now. - The only reasons I havenā€™t yet migrated to Cloudflare fully is because `wrangler` 3 was rather hard to use with TypeScript, and Vercel supports for TypeScript is superior at this point. - [6aadff3](https://github.com/aarnphm/aarnphm.github.io/commit/6aadff359a5e8ccb7879e6e8a69e79c8ba1542cd): Migrated to Cloudflare Workers - Upgrading Quartz to the latest 4.5.x requires a major changes into how it handles incremental builds, so I found that this was a good time to switch/migrate fully to Cloudflare Workers. - They have now a lot better TS supports, with `wrangler types` and `wrangler dev`, which simplifies the setup a ton with Quartz. - Migrating from Pages and Workers are very refreshing, as their [docs](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/static-assets/migration-guides/migrate-from-pages/) details all that you need to look out for. - I havenā€™t seen a lot of good documentations, other than Cloudflare, Amazon, and Vercel. ## pros and ā€œnot-pros-yetā€. You can pretty much [Google](https://www.google.com/search?q=cloudflare+vs+vercel\&oq=cloudflare+vs+vercel\&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgAEAAYgAQyBwgAEAAYgAQyDAgBEAAYFBiHAhiABDIMCAIQABgUGIcCGIAEMgcIAxAAGIAEMgcIBBAAGIAEMggIBRAAGBYYHjIICAYQABgWGB4yCAgHEAAYFhgeMggICBAAGBYYHjIICAkQABgWGB7SAQgyNjcxajBqNKgCALACAQ\&sourceid=chrome\&ie=UTF-8) comparison all day long to see whether it is sensible to migrate your whole infrastructure between these two providers. At the end of the day, the following are what _I care about_ when building a functional website: - Performance: I want people who cares about optimizing for miliseconds - Security: reduce crawlers, fast, 100% uptime, so that I donā€™t have to worry about them. - Intuitive UX: follows zero-config philosophy (I think [Ghostty](https://ghostty.org/docs/config) is a prime example of this). I donā€™t have to configure a tons of stuff and can simply toggle items on the dashboard - Friendly developer tooling: I want to write code, so tooling must be good. - Pricing: free offering, otherwise pay-per-usage billing. Lenient on storage is a huge plus. | Criteria | Cloudflare | Vercel | | -------------------------- | ------------ | --------------------- | | Performance | āœ… | šŸš§ [^vercel-perf] | | Security | āœ… | šŸš§ [^vercel-security] | | Intuitive UX | āœ… | āœ… | | Friendly developer tooling | šŸš§ [^cf-dev] | āœ… | | Pricing | āœ… | šŸš§ | [^vercel-perf]: There is a case to be made that if I migrated everything on Vercel, it would be a lot smoother. However, this is not the case given that Vercel is designed to integrated well with Next, and supports for platform-agnostic framework (such as Quartz) are rather limited. I prefer not to spend that much time on making it work with Vercel. Also the pricing is also a big hurdles for me. [^vercel-security]: There has always been a huge hurdles around Vercelā€™s security on Twitter and the internet in general. The team works very well to circumvent these problems, but as a user it didnā€™t give me a lot of conviction when comparing to other alternatives (such as Cloudflare, AWS, GCP) [^cf-dev]: `wrangler` has been historically harder to use comparing to vercel setup. However, with the recent v4, it has become a lot more simpler and easier to use. But credits where credits are due, Vercel triumphs in terms of users experience here. Their KV as well as D1 databases are a safe bet for me to prototype with a few more features I want to build for the sites. Their AI gateway is also a plus. From this comparison, Cloudflare did seem to come out on top, for my use-case. However, I donā€™t think this would be a signal for you to move to Cloudflare completely. Vercel is good for you if: - developer UX and building sites with supported frameworks. Next, Svelte, Solid are all amazing to work with when using `vercel` (from my experience on other projects) - seamless user experience with observability and metrics from their dashboard. - suite of products and resources for you to build your next 1M ARR business youā€™re willing to šŸ˜ƒ Cloudflare is good for you if: - If you care about security and donā€™t have to worry too much about the minor details - static sites - free plan > \[!note\] AI-related supports > > They both have AI-related products, but Iā€™m not going to compare it here given that I donā€™t use them extensively. Finally, I do have a lot of conviction in Cloudflare, through their [open source](https://github.com/cloudflare)and their leadership. However, it goes without saying that Vercel is still considered as a startup, comparing to Cloudflare, a publicly traded company. The mere sizes comparison between the two shows how far Vercel has come and essentially brings competition to these giants, and I canā€™t wait for one day, for Vercel to win.