Thank you Github pages and Cloudflare

22 Jun 2014

I recently migrated my blog from a DigitalOcean server running Wordpress to Jekyll running on Github Pages, behind Cloudflare. I went from a paid server running a blogging software to a free service (github pages) with Jekyll as the static blog framework. During the move I noticed I would need to stop using SSL and that introduced the ability to use Cloudflare for free.

The reasons why I moved were:

• Price
• Speed of blogging

What I lost not running my own server:

• HTTPS
• Google Adwords (no reason to keep them)

What I gained from using Github Pages, Jekyll and Cloudflare:

• Speed
• Uptime
• Backups
• Price
• Protection from Cloudflare

Losing SSL is tough for me as I am a supporter of SSL for everything, but the pros of moving slightly edged out the reasons to keep SSL. Though SSL is available via the non-custom domain name of this blog. (nictrix.github.io)

Getting better uptime and speed was a nice thing to have when switching, however it wasn't a prerequisite. An awesome reason to switch was free backups (I shouldn't say that, but I'm putting some trust in github pages)

I use a free pingdom account to monitor my blog and after moving it I checked the account and to my surprise I had a 633% decrease in response time, it went from 950 ms to 150 ms.

That speed decrease is very impressive! Using Github's infrastructure for speed and Cloudflare's services to provide protection and speed I greatly increased my availability and decreased response time. Thank you for such wonderfully free services!