my site costs zero dollars to stay up. literally zero. the only expense is the domain. (⌐■_■)
i dont have a server. i dont have a vps. i dont pay for hosting. i dont have a traditional database. everything runs for free on cloudflare pages and workers.
sometimes i see people saying they spend a hundred bucks a month on their tiny sites and i keep thinking... do u really need all that? cant u trim it down?
how it works here
the site is just static html. no wordpress (ew, i hate it), no cms, no php running. just html, css and js files thrown on cloudflare pages. they serve it for free with global cdn and https included.
for comments, cloudflare workers with kv storage. serverless, i dont pay anything for my usage. each comment is just a key-value stored there.
and the chat with lain? also free. its a vanilla javascript widget that sends requests to cloudflare workers ai. i use the llama 3.1 8b model running on their infra, i dont pay anything on the free plan. it has rate limit per ip (30 per day) and turnstile so it doesnt become a mess, but for a personal site the quota is more than enough.
and backup? git. the whole site is in a repo. if everything explodes i just clone and throw it back up. why pay for a backup service when git already does it for free?
no admin panel, no dashboard, no plugin to update. i write posts by hand, git push and done. deploy is automatic.
i cant afford a monthly blog
im gonna be real honest. i have zero financial conditions to pay just to have a corner on the internet. and i think a lot of people are in the same situation.
i also dont make any revenue from this site. no subscription, no donation link, no courses, no ads. this place is just my little corner to write stuff and it doesnt need to make money.
theres nothing wrong with wanting to monetize. but i literally cant, so i built an architecture that charges me nothing. simple as that.
do u really need all that?
sure, if ur site gets millions of visits per day or needs complex features, then thats another story. but for a personal blog, portfolio or simple content site?
static html with serverless comments solves 99% of cases and costs zero. sometimes the problem isnt lack of money, its an architecture too complicated for something that could be simple.
people paying for servers, databases, panels, backups, cache plugins... and in the end the site just serves text and images. (¬_¬)
i know cloudflare wont be free forever in all cases, but for modest personal use like mine, the free plan is more than enough.
i just wanted a place on the internet that was mine, no algorithm, no ads, no trackers. and i found out u can have that without spending almost anything. u just need to keep things simple~
sometimes we think we need a castle when a little wooden house already does the job (´｡• ᵕ •｡`)