#3 Choosing a Hosting Server
A history of web hosting from Apache and Nginx to CDN and Cloudflare, discussing why Cloudflare is ideal for modern blogs.
Now that we have decided where to save our project, the next step is finding a server to publish our project files on the internet.
In the past, web servers started with HTTPd (from 1990), succeeded by Apache (from 1995) which ruled as king for a long time. However, as Apache grew heavy with complex features, the mainstream shifted globally to Nginx (from 2004) for its lightweight, high-speed processing.
However, serving content from a single server inevitably causes physical latency. As data travels through various network nodes to reach homes, offices, and mobile devices, the overhead of the route increases. With the explosion of internet traffic, transmitting data over long distances takes even more time.
To solve this, the concept of a CDN (Content Delivery Network) emerged. It delivers content from the server closest to the user rather than a single central server—a natural solution for speed. While building and maintaining such networks is extremely costly, once established, there is no system more powerful.
Eventually, outsourcing to specialized hosting providers became far more cost-effective than running on-premise servers. Companies worldwide began migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. I once helped manage servers for life and non-life insurance companies. Huge buildings with perfect air conditioning, specialized security personnel, server maintenance staff, massive hardware support fees, and backup generators in the basement—it was a terrifyingly expensive operation. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense that consolidating infrastructure under specialized providers reduces costs compared to every company building their own.
As on-premise infrastructure declined, cloud giants like AWS dominated the world. Then, Cloudflare (US) arrived like a comet. Initially gaining traction by protecting sites from web attacks, they leveraged their security roots to offer specialized DNS and CDN services. Rather than just replacing servers with virtual machines, they focused on safe, high-speed delivery of static content. Today, they are a massive force, reportedly holding over an 80% market share in the CDN space.
Many websites, even if they use databases under the hood, can actually be served as static pages with only periodic updates. Blog sites are a prime example of this.
【Cloudflare Server Free Tier】
AWS's free tier is limited to small instance sizes like t3.micro without CDN capabilities. In contrast, Cloudflare is CDN-enabled from the start.
- Workers Free: 100,000 requests/day
- Queues Free: 10,000 operations/day (sum of read/write/delete) (async queues)
- Hyperdrive Free: 100,000 DB queries/day (DB connection layer)
- D1 limit: Under 500MB per database, under 5GB per account
All of this is available in the free tier! It is incredibly generous. Furthermore, bandwidth is free, which is a massive contrast to other cloud services where costs scale with traffic. It is fast, cheap, and high-performance—truly a three-in-one package. In addition, servers located closest to users are called 'edge servers.' Even for static sites, you can achieve quite a lot right on the edge using Cloudflare Workers.
By now, the direction should be clear. Cloudflare's service is ideal for launching both personal and corporate websites. Since many sites cover account setup and getting started, we'll omit those details here.