Under construction pt. 2: Leveraging Cloudflare
Just a brief update on how things are rolling. As the returning readers already know, this site is built with Ghost blogging platform and the back-end is managed using Cloudron. On the infrastructural level we are utilizing Cloudflare and you should too.
Cloudflare is a publicly listed Internet powerhouse based in USA. Most internet users actually use their services, without knowing about it. Cloudflare doesn't raise headlines like Google or Microsoft, but in many ways they could be considered as an internet giant. In our article regarding the internet scams that target kids, we have briefly mentioned their DNS services for family safety. Their product portfolio is however massive, offering extremely high quality free tools that any webmaster can utilize.
- Cloudflare is a cost efficient domain registrar. I have about a dozen different domains, all registered at Cloudflare. They provide this service at cost.
- They provide a free CDN that caches and delivers the content of the website, speeding up page load times and reducing server loads. In addition their proxy provides protection against DDOS and other types of attacks, allow you to define redirection rules and a ton of other features.
- For the backups of this site, I use Cloudflare R2 object storage. They have a very generous 10 GB free plan for storing the backups or other files. For the storage exceeding 10 gigs, they charge a tiny fee. This is a perfect solution for a small website or a blog, which can go far with the free plan. I configured a snapshot backup to be made on daily basis and stored for two weeks. If this website or server blows up for any reason, I can just restore a backup with Cloudron and get back online.
I have used their services for years and like them so much, that I have big stake in their stock as well (ticker $NET).
With the backups finally in place, all the most critical pieces of the software stack should now be in order. What this site still needs is a good logo to add some flair to the front page. At some point I will be adding the possibility to subscribe, in case someone would like to get notified of new articles. With membership subscription I could also enable the possibility to comment on the posts, in order to get some interaction with the readers.
As a word of warning, I will be adding Google Adsense ads here at some point, but so far they have rejected my application for this site. It is not really to make money, and I expect none, but I want to study how their auto ads feature works.
Several article ideas are stirring up too. There should be some stuff coming up on Chrome OS Flex and I have also been looking into the Fresh Tomato router firmware...
Stay tuned!
