When I started the “Candidatos FIME” site, the main technology was clear: Hugo, a very fast static site generator. That gave me a quick, secure site from day one. One question was still open: where to host it?
What I needed
The list was concrete:
- Free: it’s a community project, so the budget was zero.
- Scalable: traffic could spike during key periods, and the site couldn’t go down because of a surge in visits.
- Automated: I wanted to
git pushand have the site publish itself, no FTP uploads like it’s 2005. - Fast: a slow site is a site nobody visits.
Cloudflare Pages
I explored several options, from traditional shared hosting to more modern services, and settled on Cloudflare Pages, which checked all four boxes.
Setup was trivial: I connected the GitHub repository, Cloudflare automatically detected it was a Hugo project and set up the build process for me. Within minutes the site was online, served from their global CDN (a network of servers spread around the world that delivers the page from the point closest to each visitor).
For me, the deciding advantage was the integration with the development flow: the deploy.yml in GitHub Actions talks directly to Cloudflare to deploy.
Today, every time I update the code or a candidate’s data, a git push to the main branch triggers a process that builds, validates, and deploys the site in seconds. All with solid performance, at zero cost.