On the 27th of February 2026 I gave my first public presentation about my website allaboutdata.eu. The venue was the Rotary Club Aigle, around twenty members gathered for lunch. The title I chose was deliberately provocative:
“Can we host a real, production-grade website for less than one US dollar per month?”
The audience was engaged, the questions were sharp — and the honest answer turned out to be more nuanced than a simple yes or no.
The Two Sites, The Two Stacks
To make the comparison concrete I used two real, independent websites I operate:
- allaboutdata.eu — hosted on AWS. A full data platform with Hugo static hosting on S3, CloudFront CDN, AWS WAF, Glue ETL pipelines, real-time monitoring, dual CDN with automatic DNS failover, and S3 contents encrypted with KMS Customer Managed Keys. A high-availability solution that goes well beyond the free tier — and the cost reflects that.
- allaboutdata-test.uk — hosted on Cloudflare. My personal portfolio: a lightweight Hugo static site stored on Cloudflare R2, served through Cloudflare’s global CDN, with WAF and DDoS protection included, TLS managed automatically, and the entire infrastructure provisioned with Terraform. Cost: essentially zero.
The comparison was not entirely fair from an AWS perspective — and I said so during the talk. The AWS setup is a much more robust, feature-rich solution. The Cloudflare site is intentionally minimal. But that asymmetry is precisely the point: what do you actually need for a static site?
The Architecture
The Cloudflare stack answers that question directly:
| Component | Tool | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Build | Hugo (open source) | $0.00 |
| Source control & CI/CD | GitHub Actions (free tier) | $0.00 |
| Storage | Cloudflare R2 | ~$0.015/GB |
| CDN | Cloudflare Global Network | Included |
| Egress | Zero (R2 model) | $0.00 |
| TLS / HTTPS | Cloudflare (automatic) | $0.00 |
| Total | < $0.04/month |
Both stacks share the same developer discipline: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, automated deployments via GitHub Actions on every push to main, and global edge delivery so that a visitor in Tokyo never fetches content from Europe.
What AWS adds — and what justifies its cost — is everything beyond delivery: Glue ETL crawlers and Spark jobs, a Bronze→Silver→Gold data lakehouse, CloudWatch dashboards, EventBridge schedulers, SNS alerts, Athena SQL analytics, and Lambda exports. None of that has an equivalent on Cloudflare’s free tier, nor should it — these are different tools for different problems.
Key Takeaways
- Static sites are underrated. If your content doesn’t change per user, there is no reason to pay for a server.
- Egress fees are the hidden killer. Traditional cloud providers charge for every byte leaving storage. Cloudflare R2 does not.
- Infrastructure as Code from day one. The entire Cloudflare configuration is managed with Terraform — reproducible, auditable, version-controlled.
- GitHub Actions is enough. For static sites, a free-tier CI/CD pipeline handles everything you need.
- Know what you are paying for. The AWS cost is real, but so is the value: KMS encryption, multi-region setup, WAF managed rules, and a full observability stack are not free anywhere else either.
Audience Feedback
I received extremely useful feedback that I intend to incorporate in the next version of this talk. The honest summary: the first two slides land well with a non-technical audience. After that, the complexity escalates too quickly. Architecture diagrams that are clear to an engineer are opaque to everyone else.
This is the most important thing I learned on the day — and I consider it a gift. The next version of this talk will be structured around the story first, the architecture second.
What’s Next
I will be refining the slides based on the feedback and presenting again. Every iteration will be signed with a SwissSign Qualified Electronic Signature — which means each version is cryptographically timestamped and tamper-evident, permanently on record under eIDAS regulations.
Version 1 exists. It is signed. It is published. That is what matters.
Slides & Resources
The slides are available to download below. The talk was delivered in French; the slides are in English. The PDF is signed with a SwissSign Qualified Electronic Signature (27 février 2026) — if you open it in a PDF reader you can verify the signature and confirm the document has not been modified since it was signed.