How I Host and Deploy My Astro Site for $0 on Cloudflare

Deploying static websites has never been easier, and Cloudflare makes the process remarkably smooth. Being able to upload static assets generated with Astro, or any static site generator (SSG), and point a custom domain to it for free is a game-changer. Aside from the yearly cost of your domain registration, hosting purely static pages costs practically nothing.

While Cloudflare offers a Workers Paid Plan at $5/month (which unlocks higher build limits, additional build slots, and extra resources for dynamic Astro server-side rendering), you honestly don’t need it if you’re just hosting static files. You can host your entire site on the free tier. The primary guardrail to keep in mind is the individual file size limit, currently capped at 25MB, which is plenty for standard static sites. There are no surprise bandwidth fees, making it an incredible value whether you stay on the free tier or upgrade down the road.

The Old Setup vs. The New Flow

Before streamlining this setup, I hosted my blog on a DigitalOcean VPS running Nginx and Let’s Encrypt. The pipeline relied on a GitHub webhook that triggered a build script directly on the server whenever changes were pushed.

Later, I built a custom admin panel called AstroCMS to manage my blog posts from anywhere (which I wrote about in detail in my post: Built an Astro CMS Admin in Go). With that setup, I bypassed the server webhook altogether: I would trigger a local build directly through the admin panel since I already knew an update was happening, and push the commit up to GitHub.

With Cloudflare handling deployments, the entire pipeline is much leaner. Now, AstroCMS simply commits and pushes the updated markdown directly to GitHub, and Cloudflare automatically takes care of the build and edge deployment.

What’s Next for the Blog?

Now that deploying content is practically frictionless, I’m planning to roll out two major features:

• A Custom Comments Section: With readership growing, adding community discussions is the next logical step. I plan to build a lightweight backend service in Go, complete with an admin dashboard for moderation and AI-driven spam filtering. If it works well, I might even package it as a standalone tool for others to use.
• Email Subscriptions: While I share new posts across social media, direct email updates are still the most reliable way to keep readers in the loop. Adding a clean newsletter delivery system will make it easy for subscribers to get new articles delivered straight to their inbox.

If you haven’t tried deploying your static sites to Cloudflare yet, give it a shot, it’s fast, reliable, and free to get started. Stay tuned for these upcoming features, along with more software experiments coming soon!

~ Joshua