4 ms·

Just pushed an update - btw Cloudflare pages are fantastic its been perfection for a personal site.

by benadam11 5y ago

kentonv 5y ago
Hmm I don't see any change yet but LOL if the 404s turn out to be my own fault due to a Workers bug. :)
- benadam11 5y ago
  https://3be909f6.personal-site-v4.pages.dev/ https://3be909f6.personal-site-v4.pages.dev/ has the updated styles but the change doesnt seem to have propagated to domain yet (made the background pure white instead of grey)
  - kentonv 5y ago
    Yeah that page looks much better, not just the colors but also the headings and paragraphs are now formatted correctly. Crazily enough, it looks like the missing files are actually a problem on our (Cloudflare's) end. We're looking into it. But a re-deploy should fix it for now, I think.
    - kentonv 5y ago
      Hey Ben, we think your re-deploy solved the problem, but the old content is still being served from Cloudflare's cache for many people. Can you do a cache purge in the Cloudflare dashboard? (It just updated for me, looks much better. But the old version might still be cached in some locations.) The root cause was actually something we fixed last month, but it seems problems can stick around if the site was originally deployed before that fix... we're working on that.
      - kentonv 5y ago
        On further investigation we think this might have been purely a caching issue, not the backend problem we originally suspected. The problem is that your site generator produces different file names for each version, but doesn't preserve the old files. So when you upload a new version, then the old version of the assets become 404, unless they happened to be cached. But it's possible the HTML is cached and the CSS not cached, in which case people will get the old HTML which refers to a CSS file that is now 404. This is a classic problem and we need to find a better way to solve it. In principle, though, you could manually avoid it by preserving older versions of the CSS such that they continue to be served under new versions of the site. Alternatively, if you change the config on your domain so that it doesn't cache at all (or at least turn off the "cache everything" option), and instead rely on Cloudflare Pages itself to manage caching, that also should mostly* avoid the problem. Pages does do its own caching, so adding a second layer of caching on top of that shouldn't be necessary. * There's still a problem if someone is unlucky enough to load the site exactly when it's being updated, but at least a refresh fixes that. We need a better answer, though...
        denysvitali 5y ago
        Wow. Thanks for the explanation and for being humble in considering it (partially) your mistake. I have to admit it was quite a plot twist, but this is why I love HN: we're both users and developers at the same time!
        benadam11 5y ago
        Thanks for following up! Looks like that setting was on from an old version of the site. Probably not a super common thing for people who are onboarding to CF Pages (previously my origin was on AWS) and I migrated to Pages.
        aghilmort 5y ago
        seconded -- great read / info also as user of Cloudflare Pages for multiple domains
        souldeux 5y ago
        interesting read, thanks for sharing this
zzleeper 5y ago
I'm curious, how do they compare against S3? (cheaper, easier to use, ...?)
- benadam11 5y ago
  I had my site fronted with CF previously w/ an origin on S3 and it cost about $0.53/mo (super cheap). CF Pages current pricing is free for unlimited bandwidth which is pretty incredible - https://pages.cloudflare.com/#pricing https://pages.cloudflare.com/#pricing

Just pushed an update - btw Cloudflare pages are fantastic its been perfection for a personal site.

kentonv 5y ago

Hmm I don't see any change yet but LOL if the 404s turn out to be my own fault due to a Workers bug. :)

benadam11 5y ago
https://3be909f6.personal-site-v4.pages.dev/ https://3be909f6.personal-site-v4.pages.dev/ has the updated styles but the change doesnt seem to have propagated to domain yet (made the background pure white instead of grey)
- kentonv 5y ago
  Yeah that page looks much better, not just the colors but also the headings and paragraphs are now formatted correctly. Crazily enough, it looks like the missing files are actually a problem on our (Cloudflare's) end. We're looking into it. But a re-deploy should fix it for now, I think.
  - kentonv 5y ago
    Hey Ben, we think your re-deploy solved the problem, but the old content is still being served from Cloudflare's cache for many people. Can you do a cache purge in the Cloudflare dashboard? (It just updated for me, looks much better. But the old version might still be cached in some locations.) The root cause was actually something we fixed last month, but it seems problems can stick around if the site was originally deployed before that fix... we're working on that.
    - kentonv 5y ago
      On further investigation we think this might have been purely a caching issue, not the backend problem we originally suspected. The problem is that your site generator produces different file names for each version, but doesn't preserve the old files. So when you upload a new version, then the old version of the assets become 404, unless they happened to be cached. But it's possible the HTML is cached and the CSS not cached, in which case people will get the old HTML which refers to a CSS file that is now 404. This is a classic problem and we need to find a better way to solve it. In principle, though, you could manually avoid it by preserving older versions of the CSS such that they continue to be served under new versions of the site. Alternatively, if you change the config on your domain so that it doesn't cache at all (or at least turn off the "cache everything" option), and instead rely on Cloudflare Pages itself to manage caching, that also should mostly* avoid the problem. Pages does do its own caching, so adding a second layer of caching on top of that shouldn't be necessary. * There's still a problem if someone is unlucky enough to load the site exactly when it's being updated, but at least a refresh fixes that. We need a better answer, though...
      - denysvitali 5y ago
        Wow. Thanks for the explanation and for being humble in considering it (partially) your mistake. I have to admit it was quite a plot twist, but this is why I love HN: we're both users and developers at the same time!
      - benadam11 5y ago
        Thanks for following up! Looks like that setting was on from an old version of the site. Probably not a super common thing for people who are onboarding to CF Pages (previously my origin was on AWS) and I migrated to Pages.
        aghilmort 5y ago
        seconded -- great read / info also as user of Cloudflare Pages for multiple domains
      - souldeux 5y ago
        interesting read, thanks for sharing this

zzleeper 5y ago

I'm curious, how do they compare against S3? (cheaper, easier to use, ...?)

benadam11 5y ago
I had my site fronted with CF previously w/ an origin on S3 and it cost about $0.53/mo (super cheap). CF Pages current pricing is free for unlimited bandwidth which is pretty incredible - https://pages.cloudflare.com/#pricing https://pages.cloudflare.com/#pricing