Cloudflare Pages
Cloudflare pages is a free static hosting service similar to Netlify and in some ways even better. Whereas Netlify allows a generous bandwidth allowannce of 100gb per month Cloudflare has no limit at all.
Netlify deploys sites and apps to it’s CDN edge servers. Cloudflare does the same but has many more such servers so theoretically even faster.
However it’s not an easy battle. Whether those extra edge servers provide any real advantage is debatable. Bandwidth may be less of an issue than build times for some and here the Netlify free tier beats Cloudflare with longer build times. At the moment it is 300 minutes per month. Netlify also has a totally first rate developer experience with fantastic docs and many other services too. Certain things like the open source Netlify CMS is particularly easy to set up on Netlify.
Personally I prefer Netlify but I use Cloudflare Pages too and there’s no doubt it’s an excellent service too so here’s a quick bit about using it.
It’s free to use so go to Cloudflare, set up an account and login. Go to the Pages section NOT Websites. From here you connect to your Git provider account (either GitHub or GitLab) and repo for your site/app and Cloudflare will build and deploy the site. Like Netlify free https is included and free urls that look like www.example-name.pages.dev where example-name is whatever name you choose.
Setting up the Hugo version
When using Hugo you want to set the version number you want your site built with. This is not too hard to find. Go to the Pages section and click on the name of the site you want to edit.
From here click on the Settings tab and then in the left hand column click on Environment variables. Here you can edit the variables so you’ll want to add one, if it’s not there already, called HUGO_VERSION. The value you give it will be the value of whichever version you wish to use, for instance 0.91.2. Click save and it will be built with that version the next time you make changes to your site. You’ll probably want to do the same for the preview version too.
See the official docs page on Enviroment variables.
