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Comment by caboteria | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about the pros and cons of Cloudflare pages versus GitHub pages. Given that you're using GH as a repo, would it be simpler to also use it to serve pages?

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https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github...

> GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS).

Not finding a similar mention for Cloudflare... commercial sites are fine there?

The way I understand this is not that Github Pages can't be used for commercial purposes, but that it's not OK for something like ecommerce with many users every minute which generates a lot of load?

So a small company could host a static landing page with generic info and "contact us" etc., and that would be fine, I think?

It also mentions that breaking the rules will result in getting a "polite email suggesting ways to reduce load on Github".

So a personal website with a personal blog is ok then.

Curious though how it handles a surge in requests, like from being on the front-page of HN. But many open source projects host their doc pages with Github pages and some of those get a lot of traffic so I'm sure that it's not an issue

GitHub Pages runs everything through a Fastly CDN. You can tell like this:

  curl -i https://simonw.github.io/

I get this:

  HTTP/2 200 
  server: GitHub.com
  content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  permissions-policy: interest-cohort=()
  last-modified: Wed, 16 Nov 2022 21:38:29 GMT
  access-control-allow-origin: *
  etag: "63755855-299"
  expires: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:20:50 GMT
  cache-control: max-age=600
  x-proxy-cache: MISS
  x-github-request-id: 3D02:22250F:11BEDCA:123BE7A:68092D2A
  accept-ranges: bytes
  age: 0
  date: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:10:50 GMT
  via: 1.1 varnish
  x-served-by: cache-pao-kpao1770029-PAO
  x-cache: MISS
  x-cache-hits: 0
  x-timer: S1745431851.518299,VS0,VE110
  vary: Accept-Encoding
  x-fastly-request-id: 0df3187f050552dfde088fae8a6a83e0dde187f5
  content-length: 665

The x-fastly-request-id is the giveaway.

The "front page of HN" has not scaled like the rest of the computing hardware has scaled. The smallest VM you can get serving static content will yawn at the full power of an HN surge. Unless you have a very 200x-era bandwidth limit, or you're trying to be on the front page of HN with a 250MB web page (which does happen), it's not anything to be concerned about anymore.

I already have several other projects and DNS managed in Cloudflare, so it made sense to keep everything in one place. GitHub Pages would definitely work too.

Where in the process do you integrate your custom domain (ingau.me) ???

I connect the custom domain in the Cloudflare Pages dashboard. Once the site is deployed, you can assign a domain under Pages > Custom Domains, and since I already manage DNS in Cloudflare, it's just a couple of clicks to route it.

Thanks :)

If you're using cloudflare already then it makes sense, closer to the edge and all that, plus there's integration to make that all very seamless from gh.

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