When it comes to hosting a static website, two popular options to get your site online is Cloudflare Pages and traditional web hosting.
This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both options
Advantages of Cloudflare Pages:
- Free: Cloudflare Pages allows you to host up to 100 static websites with unlimited visitors and bandwidth, making it excellent if you are on a budget.
- Ability to scale: You can scale to huge numbers of website visitors without overloading the server.
- Excellent Performance: Website files are served directly from the Cloudflare Network, resulting in exceptional performance across the world.
Disadvantages of Cloudflare Pages:
- Limited to 100% static content: If you require a database or server-side scripting like PHP, it is not suitable.
- 25MB File size limit: (per file) with a maximum of 20,000 files. This can be an issue if hosting large files such as PDFs.
- No user interface: No panel to manually make changes or upload files. Changes can only be made via GitHub, making the process challenging to deploy a new site and make changes.
- No included support: You will need to solve issues yourself or ask on the community forum for assistance.
Advantages of Lightweight Hosting & Other 'Traditional' Hosting Providers:
- Graphical Web Interface: A graphical interface to configure the hosting service and the ability to use FTP to upload files.
- Supports dynamic websites: Lightweight hosting supports dynamic websites with server processing such as PHP. It also supports SQLite databases for small websites that require basic data storage.
- Includes technical support: You receive technical support to assist with setting up the site, domain, or resolving any issues you may have.
Potential Disadvantages of Lightweight Hosting & Other 'Traditional' Hosting Providers:
- Paid service: Lightweight Hosting is a paid service, although it is kept as affordable as possible.
- Potentially slower for distant users: Traditional hosting from a single server may be slower for users further away from the server, but you can set up Cloudflare CDN to get the same advantages.
Both Cloudflare Pages and Traditional pages are excellent for hosting static websites, however both options have their own respective advtanages to disadvantages. <>If you have any questions with our Light Weight Hosting products or what option is best for you, please send us an email to 'sales@lightweighthosting.com'