From Code to Live
When Nick or I finish a change to the Light School website, the new version goes live in about 30 seconds. We push the code, and Cloudflare Pages handles the rest. No server to manage. No deploy script to run. It just happens.
What Cloudflare Pages Does
Cloudflare Pages is a hosting service for static websites. You give it a folder of HTML, CSS, and image files, and it publishes them to the internet. That is the core of it.
But it does something clever with those files. Instead of putting them on one server in one location, it copies them to servers all around the world. Cloudflare has data centers in over 300 cities. When someone visits lightschool.com, they get the copy that is closest to them.
Why Speed Matters
A page that loads in one second feels instant. A page that takes five seconds feels broken. The difference often comes down to distance. If the server is on the other side of the planet, every request has to travel farther.
With files on servers everywhere, the distance is always short. Someone in Tokyo loads the site just as fast as someone in New York. The experience is the same no matter where you are.
The Cost
Free. For a static site like ours, Cloudflare Pages does not charge anything. There is no monthly bill. No bandwidth fees. No hidden costs that scale with traffic.
This was a real factor in choosing it. Light School is a small project. Paying hundreds of dollars a month for hosting would not make sense when a free option does everything we need.
The Right Match
Cloudflare Pages works well for us because our site is static. There is no server-side code that needs to run. No database queries to process. Just files that get served to browsers.
If Light School needed user accounts or real-time features, we would need something more. But it does not. So we get fast, free, worldwide hosting with almost no setup. That is a good deal.
