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How to Host Website for Free | Cloudflare 🌐✨

Aniket Sharma
5 min readNov 11, 2024

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Welcome Readers,

Today I will show you how you can host your first website for free on Cloudflare. Thank you Cloudflare for provide with this free feature to get a hands on experience of website deployment.

Deploy website on Cloudflare

What is Cloudflare? ☁️

Cloudflare is a web performance and security company that offers an array of services designed to improve the security, speed, and reliability of your website. Trusted by millions of users around the world, it acts as a reverse proxy, sitting between your website and its visitors to enhance their experience while providing robust protection against online threats.

Key Features of Cloudflare:

  • Content Delivery Network (CDN): Speeds up the delivery of content by caching it across its vast network of data centers around the globe.
  • DDoS Protection: Defends your site from Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, keeping it online even when under heavy load.
  • SSL/TLS Encryption: Encrypts communication between your site and its visitors, boosting security.
  • Web Application Firewall (WAF): Blocks malicious traffic and protects against attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS).

How Cloudflare Helps to Secure the Internet 🔒

Cloudflare’s mission is to “help build a better Internet,” and it achieves this by providing a suite of security measures for websites. Here are some ways Cloudflare contributes to a safer online world:

  1. Threat Detection and Prevention: By analyzing traffic across millions of websites, Cloudflare can detect and mitigate emerging threats quickly.
  2. DDoS Mitigation: Cloudflare’s Anycast network and DDoS protection features are capable of absorbing and mitigating massive attacks.
  3. Bot Management: Cloudflare blocks malicious bots and allows good ones (like search engine crawlers) to access your site.
  4. Secure API Protection: Safeguards API endpoints, ensuring sensitive data is protected against exploitation.
  5. Automatic HTTPS Rewrites: Cloudflare ensures your website uses a secure connection by automatically rewriting HTTP links to HTTPS when available.

What is Cloudflare Pages? 📄🚀

Cloudflare Pages is a Jamstack platform for frontend developers that offers serverless hosting for your websites and web applications. With Cloudflare Pages, you can deploy your site quickly and securely with global edge networks for lightning-fast speeds. It integrates seamlessly with GitHub, allowing continuous deployment (CI/CD) whenever you push updates to your GitHub repository.

Why Choose Cloudflare Pages?

  • Free Hosting: Host personal projects at zero cost.
  • Global CDN: Enjoy blazing-fast performance with Cloudflare’s worldwide network.
  • Instant Updates: Automatic deployment on changes.
  • Custom Domains: Use your own domain, or get a free one.
  • HTTPS by Default: Free SSL/TLS certificates for secure communication.

Hosting Your First Website for Free on Cloudflare Pages 🖥️✨

Step-by-Step Guide:

  1. Sign Up for Cloudflare (if you haven’t already)
  • Head over to Cloudflare and create a free account.
  • Once you’ve signed up, you can access Cloudflare Pages.
Cloudflare Pages

2. Prepare Your Website’s Source Code 📝

  • If you have an existing website, make sure all your files (HTML, CSS, JS) are in a GitHub repository. If you don’t have one, create a GitHub account and push your files to a new repository.
  • Cloudflare Pages works best with GitHub repositories.

3. Link Your GitHub Repository to Cloudflare Pages 🔗

  • Go to Cloudflare Pages.
  • Click on “Create a Project” and choose “Connect to GitHub.”
  • Authenticate with your GitHub account and authorize Cloudflare Pages to access your repositories.
  • Select the repository that contains your website’s code.
Create an application

4. Configure Build Settings (Optional) ⚙️

  • If your site uses a static site generator (e.g., Jekyll, Hugo), configure build settings accordingly.
  • For plain HTML/CSS/JS websites, you typically won’t need any special settings.

5. Deploy Your Website 🚀

  • Click “Begin Deploy” and let Cloudflare Pages work its magic.
  • Your site will be built and deployed to a unique URL provided by Cloudflare. The deployment usually completes within a few minutes.
deployment

6. Customize Your Domain (Optional) 🌐

  • Navigate to the “Custom Domains” tab in Cloudflare Pages.
  • You can add a custom domain or use the default Cloudflare subdomain.
  • For custom domains, you’ll need to add DNS records in your DNS provider’s settings to point to Cloudflare.
custom domain

7. Celebrate! Your Website is Live! 🎉

  • Access your site via the provided Cloudflare Pages URL. You can update and push changes to your GitHub repository anytime to trigger automatic redeployment.
Website is deployed

Conclusion 🎇

Hosting a website on Cloudflare Pages is simple, secure, and FREE! By leveraging Cloudflare’s infrastructure, you benefit from industry-leading security features, global performance improvements, and a serverless architecture that scales effortlessly. I hope this guide helps you set up your own website easily!

Check out my example website hosted on Cloudflare Pages here : — techwithaniket.online

If this blog has sparked your curiosity and you’re eager for more insights, discussions, or perhaps a bit of magical banter, let’s stay connected! 🌟

Every post is a new adventure, and I’d love for you to be a part of the ongoing conversation. Feel free to reach out, share your thoughts, or simply drop by to say hello. Until the next magical encounter, stay curious and keep exploring! 🚀

Aniket Sharma
Aniket Sharma

Written by Aniket Sharma

If you want to learn DevSecOps and Cloud Security, you must follow along with me!

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