Day 1 | Picking the stack: Cloudflare + Astro this time

The first thing to decide on a website is the tech stack.

This time I went with Cloudflare and Astro. I wanted to build faster and spend less, and I already know Cloudflare from earlier sites. Get the site up first, then hook in the AI workflow piece by piece.

Hosting: Cloudflare again

I've always thought of Cloudflare as the internet's good Samaritan. 200k events is really hard to hit on a personal site.

My earlier sites already ran on it. I picked it back then for cost and for technical reasons, and on this site it's still just as generous (cheap, and you get a lot). Development and deployment are wired together, so every code change goes live through the pipeline I already have.

Knowing this deploy setup well is part of why I picked it. What I learned on the earlier sites carries straight over, and I want to tie the stack and the AI workflow together.

Framework: Astro

I used to be on Next.js, but I ran into a pile of problems, especially after Cloudflare stopped supporting one of the transpiling packages. I learned the hard way that a bad framework choice takes the whole system down with it. Over time deploys broke, merges broke, and CI/CD blew itself up ＝＝

Now I'm on Astro, and the split is simple: Astro decides how the site gets built, and Cloudflare runs the built site.

By "native support" I mean Astro has an official Cloudflare adapter. When a feature needs to run on the server, the adapter plugs it into Cloudflare's runtime. An official integration path was a big reason I picked this pair. Astro docs

I'll get to the actual project config and deploy steps in later posts. I picked Cloudflare plus Astro to keep costs where I need them, start fast, and build on what I learned from the earlier sites.

Which AI?

I use both Claude Max x20 and GPT Pro. Bought the lot ><