I have a Jekyll static blog site, domain is a “.page” registered by Google Domains currently. The website is currently hosted and served by Netlify. I’ve heard about AMP Real URL and would like to leverage it, and I used Cloudflare for some projects before and I’m satisfied. Questions:
Can I keep Netlify as a hosting provider?
Should I migrate my “.page” domain from Google Domains to Cloudflare (I think yes).
Is AMP just a button switch in the performance section, is it that simple?
What is the pricing if I have this one domain and just want this AMP Real URL feature? I haven’t find any figures about AMP Real URL anywhere (I read like 3-4 blogs and announcements by CloudFlare).
@intr0 thanks. 3. The website is already following AMP rules.
So… CloudFlare can host Jekyll websites? I need to read about that.
(I used CloudFlare before only as registrar with superior security features protecting cloud native apps, but never as an app host)
Yes. It’s especially easy using GitHub. I use GitLab, which is also just as easy. CloudFlare will protect any asset / site you’ve got no matter the SSG you’re using.
@csaba.toth.us let us know when you’ve got it up and running,
@intr0 So after some search I saw two main venues:
A.) Traditional Jekyll GitHub hosting. I’m not sure how much this is different from Cloudflare point of view. Netlify itself automatically feeds from GitHub repo pushes and build the Jekyll site.
B.) Looks like Cloudflare has a way to support generic static websites, but in that case my site won’t be built by the hosting (like GitHub or Netlify builds my site for me and they have Ruby-on-Rails web application server). The hosting is literally the serving of static files. (Cloudflare Workers Sites and You can now host static sites on Cloudflare)
Netlify isn’t hosting your site either. GitHub is your host. Netlify may have pretty looking graphical “builds” but that’s only what is happening behind the scenes when Netlify is processing your _redirect and netlify.toml rules. CloudFlare has workers to perform the same functions your netlifly.toml file. In addition, although you technically can cache your site using Netlify, it takes additional instructions in the .toml file. Whereas CloudFlare will cache what you tell it to and not tell you “no, you really need to refetch everything every time you deploy your site and even when it’s not being deployed unless you tell us not to continually refetch and redeploy it to add to your build minutes”.
In my case my GitHub repo does not do any gh-pages serving whatsoever. Netlify is connected to the repo, and it does the same thing what GitHub gh-pages would do: it generates the static website based on the Jekyll source code pulled from the repo and serves the result. So Netlify does have the Ruby-on-Rails application server and the Jekyll build infrastructure. I don’t have any netlify.toml file (as far as I know).
The reason I went to Netlify is because a year ago I had faint plans to move to JavaScript based static site generator framework instead of Jekyll/RoR. I’m staying with Jekyll so I don’t have any roadblocks to just simply revert back to traditional gh-pages hosting by GitHub (or GitLab) without Netlify. I’d prefer that compared to CloudFlare KV-based static file hosting because GtiHub/GitLab would perform the site build for me.
Moving to AMP Real URL may take some weeks for me because I’m working on multiple projects, including the website content itself.
Netlify is showing you what it’s doing after you push any changes to your site. Without the initial push,
Netlify has no idea what to do besides repeatedly rebuilding the exact same site over and over. Using Cloudflare to “serve” your site gives it the benefit of the protection it offers, including DNS servers for your site so that GitHub or GitLab is not using their DNS servers used for every other site they serve.
I think the $0 is worth it, considering you also benefit from a proper TLS cert that is site-specific instead of using only *.GitHub.io as a wildcard cert to enable it to act as a cert for every single site served using GitHub. It’s much the same with Netlify using Let’s Encrypt as a cert provider except that if you actually examine the way Netlify issues its certs, you’ll find a mismatch directly below the leaf cert.
(Attachment publicKey - [email protected] - dc622ac9.asc is missing)
I have my custom domain. The difference between having Netlify in the pipeline or just straight having GitHub / GitLab is the different CNAME (csaba.netlify.app vs csabaconsulting.github.io) I need to redirect to, and the different A IP addresses in the DNS settings, and that’s it.
I did not need to transfer my custom domain name registrar from Google Domains to Cloudflare to have AMP Real URL enabled. It’s enabled now, I’ll monitor how it’ll work the next weeks. I may transfer it at some point though.
GitLab won me for hosting. First they support any version Ruby Gem. There are no limitations like with GitHub. This became unavoidable when I realized that the standard paginator cannot pre-filter by categories and I have multiple blog sequences, so I realized I’ll need to use jekyll-paginate-2 (GitHub doesn’t list it as supported).
GitLab also won me for hosting because although I have to create a CI configuration file, but the build/CI pipeline won’t be a black-box like it is with GitHub.
AMP Real URL is running for a while now. I still need to make the pages better to provide images as well, so Google can have a full card with images in the search hit results. (Read about structured data schema).
Newer update: .app, .dev, .page HSTS TLDs are not supported by Cloudflare at the time of writing. I was about to transfer my domain when I learned this. See the supported TLD list: TLD Policies
Awesome. Yeah, GitLab is a superior Git host; they allow far more configuration choices for what you want to create. Plus they don’t treat people like children by dictating limits like GitHub.