The Problem with Google Cloud Platform
The claim in my previous article that the GCP (Google Cloud Platform) deployment of this static website would cost 1$ turned out to be farther from the truth than I expected.
That claim stemmed from the pure storage bucket cost of a mere few kilobytes of data. Which indeed did only amount to less than a dollar a month. The crux of the matter was with needing proper SSL certification and the obligatory load balancer infrastructure required to establish the SSL handshake and pipe the data which in itself is a compute instance.
The latter aspect of this deployment costs around 18$ a month. Which, considering what it was actually doing is grossly overpriced. For that amount I could have got myself a Raspberry Pi Zero to host this static website on each month - and with a few cents to spare. In the realm of managed services, I would have been much better off using a service like Railway or even the fallen from grace Heroku, for that matter.
Introducing Cloudflare Pages
In my search for an alternative, I came across Cloudflare pages. They specialize in static pages and have a very generous free tier that fits my hosting needs to boot! Considering I’m already using Cloudflare for DDoS protection and for managing my domains, it seemed to be the perfect fit. I was surprised I hadn’t come across it till now.
I no longer need to worry about deployment or any CI/CD pipeline for publishing my website, it picks it up and builds it right out of your github repository; similar to Railway
That concludes the migration away from Google Cloud platform and updates regarding how my place is hosted and deployed.