New Site using New Stack....for FREE

I saved $1000/year by cancelling subscriptions I didn’t need. And you can too…well, maybe 😀

Back in 2015, when I was forced to create a website for myself as part of a research class, I decided to host it on AWS using simple EC2 services running a LAMP stack. Nothing fancy, and it probably cost me $300/year. I could ssh into the servers, renew my own HTTPS certificates, make simple changes, and life was easy. I was using WordPress as the CMS, which I liked initially, but eventually found to be too constraining for my taste. But my laziness overpowered my dislike to do anything about it. I continued occasionally making blog posts.

Fast forward to 2022. Squarespace became popular and everyone was talking about it. I gave it a shot. It was a significantly simpler experience than hosting on EC2, fixing the occasional database crashes, renewing my certificates, and fighting WordPress to make changes the way I wanted. I migrated my entire stack to Squarespace and paid them $330/year. Their CMS was a lot better than WordPress too, I would argue.

I liked Squarespace enough that I started hosting two new services on it, bringing the total money I spent to $990/year. Not bad, I thought.

I continued writing my occasional blog posts that are probably read by none except my dad ❤️

In June 2026, I got an urge to try something different. I looked around and found Cloudflare. I knew about it but never bothered to check it out. There is a saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Not in my case. It’s a privileged statement to make, but I didn’t care enough about the money I was spending on Squarespace to look for alternatives. But the idea of taking things into my own hands and hosting a simple HTML based website was fascinating enough. So I dug in.

Cloudflare gives you 100 compute workers per account for free. You can have 100,000 requests per day that reset every night, 20,000 static-asset files per worker, etc. You can read more about their free plan, but for me, given how little traffic my three projects receive, this was more than enough.

The end result - I spent about two weeks migrating everything from Squarespace to Cloudflare while hosting my code in a Git repo, with total control over every aspect of my websites. I decided to use Cusdis for moderating comments on the site, Google Analytics for analyzing the 1-person traffic (that I get from my dad), and Gmail for redirecting all emails like faiz@faizabidi.com to my personal email account. All for…FREE!