Was switching to cloudflare worth it?

Short answer: yes. But here’s an analysis of that decision anyway.

1. Lowering your Bill: This all began when I was doing some financial upkeep and realized my domain bill was a little higher than I’d like it to be. In the past, I never thought too hard about it because the registrar had the word “cheap” right in the name so I just assumed I was more or less getting the best deal. Lo in behold I find out this is not the case! And cloudflare, after some research apparently just has so much money/business that they can offer truly at-cost domain pricing. I was able to lower my renewal bill by 20% and thus being able to keep more of the names that mattered to me without having to let them go.

2. Consolidation of hosting: Before this website used to be hosted on Netlify cause its what I first found on google. There was a private testing domain at hostinger for a brief period (and I paid some money to host this one). But cloudflare let me bring all that under ONE roof FOR FREE (since I don’t have that much traffic to begin with). And if I need to test a new project - I can just spin up another “Page/Worker” just to make sure their isn’t crazy compatibility issues or something, no testing domain, no random hosting site either. On the internet it seems like every business is trying to nickel and dime you and perhaps cloudflare is prepping me for that in the future, but for now - I can’t complain! It’s an entire expense basically gone!

3. Domain transfers/WHOIS: While I do think the process is close to the same for all of them. I was impressed at the speed and efficiency that cloudflare had. I haven’t explicitly seen cloudFlares WHOIS privacy settings and I don’t remember being explicitly asked about it so I assume its included with the domain registration. I have not seen any uptick in any of my spam folders so its probably protecting my most sensitive details at least.

4. Support: Frankly I’m not someone who ever needed a lot of “support” , with my previous registrar I only ever contacted them 1-2X in like 5Y and even those were only refund requests (ie I was the one who made a bad call in buying something too quick, nothing actually went wrong with the services provided). When people bring up issues with cloudflare its usually with their support it seems and perhaps I’m taking a gamble but based on my needs-I shouldn’t need them all that much.

5. Minimalism: I know I know , one look at the cloudflare dashboard and you must think what does THIS have anything to do with minimalism??? I don’t mean minimalism of the tool itself , I mean keeping track of less companies. As I mentioned before, I had a seperate spot for hosting , a seperate spot for domains, etc. Now I have ONE account related to all my endeavors and that helps me close those other accounts and clear up any headspace I had to keep track of yet another tool/application.

6. Analytics: I’m not gonna lie, they seem a little wonky/generously high so I just don’t trust them. But as I would later learn, their web analytics tend to track every bot request and or cyberattack or whatever else your website gets and shows you the real raw numbers. Is there a way to probably hone it in to just unique visits from real people? I’m sure someone has figured it out. But I just use a seperate third party tool (Umami) to simplify my process towards this. All I ever really want to see is which posts are people actually reading and which countries are any readers from :)

All in all I feel good about this! A little excited to learn the ins and outs of what it can do! Famous last words before I get hit with the cold water? Who knows, but if something does change, I will update the blog for sure.