A tale of two static site hosts

01 November 2025

This site has been moved to Cloudflare pages. It used to be hosted on Azure blob storage behind Azure CDN. So what happened? Why move?

One day I got an email from Azure "Hey, you need to migrate away from Azure CDN classic, and move to either Azure Front Door standard or premium". Okay fine, this is a personal site that gets very little traffic, so I'll use Front Door standard I guess. Not the premium one. I upgraded to it. Usually my hosting costs have been about $2.00 per month. After migrating to Front Door: a $22.00 bill . Okay fine, I'll remove Azure Front Door and just point my DNS straight to the static site.

Uh oh - now I've got certificate errors. HTTPS is broken. The site is insecure. I didn't have time to fix this for about a month, so my site was only available after clicking through a bunch of security notices. I've always struggled with the user experience of Azure. Using blob storage to host a static site has always felt awkward, even though it's a common use case. So, finally I decided enough is enough and to migrate the site to Cloudflare pages.

What was the experience like moving to Cloudflare pages? I went to Cloudflare and:

1. Registered using Google single sign-on
2. Clicked "new application", "Pages"
3. I authenticated to my GitHub and pointed Cloudflare to the repo
4. Chose the 11ty option for the type of site.

Then the build started. My developer brain kicked in: "How is this going to fail? What configuration changes am I going to need to make? What version of 11ty and node.js are cloudflare running? Are they going to point to the correct directory for the site root?". Then the log said "build successful". They gave me a URL and my site was live at a Cloudflare URL. I updated my custom domain in Cloudflare and my domain host. Then I was finished.

And the site is FAST. Like, crazy fast. At no point in this process had I given them a credit card or anything. Cloudflare pages are basically free until you become famous. It's almost annoying how good this experience is.

Have other people come across the same issue with Azure blob storage static sites? YES! Eakan Gopalakrishnan has basically written the same blogpost as this. Also on reddit, there are a bunch of posts from people with static sites on Azure mad about these changes. This seems to be a pretty common problem for a lot of people hosting their sites! In Microsoft's defence, people using blob storage to host their static sites for $2.00 a month are not customers that get Azure profitable. We probably cost more in administration costs than we give to Azure. We aren't worth worrying about from a money-making perspective. Azure make their money from big enterprises burning millions on Cloud services. I don't matter in the scheme of things.

But how much goodwill can you burn? A lot of the people hosting these static sites will be developers like myself. If we get the rug pulled under us by a cloud provider in our fun personal sites, how are we going to trust the same provider at work where there's real money on the line?

It reminds me a little bit of Facebook. In 2009, we used Facebook to connect and see posts from friends, and I loved writing posts. Now after years of repeated rug-pulls and breaches of trust, I don't want to invest anything into Facebook. It's 45% slop, 45% ads and 10% things related to my friends and family. I'm only there because I have to be. The cultural relevance of Facebook is not what it once was. I certainly wouldn't develop any apps or games on top of Facebook's platform because I couldn't trust them not to change the rules underneath me.

Now Azure have burned a bunch of goodwill on these CDN changes, and Cloudflare have earned my goodwill by making such a smooth onboarding process and giving away low-traffic sites for free. The question is, does this goodwill actually matter? To the immediate bottom line of these companies, probably not. However, I think there's only so many rug pulls you can do before you become the Facebook of Cloud platforms. Before you lose your relevance.

Now here come the caveats. Who remembers Kiwifarms? It was (is?) a site to doxx trans people and make their lives hell. Any respectable company should have refused that website service and told it to take a hike. Cloudflare were proudly defending it against DDOS attacks. They made the wrong call on that.

On a more selfish note: it has been good for me career-wise to practice a little bit of Azure configuration. It's not something that I enjoy, but it's something that I have had to do for work. It's good to eat your vegetables. A little practice using Azure for my personal site made me slightly less lost configuring Azure websites and databases at work.

Stay safe out there, and don't get rug-pulled.