If you’ve spoken to me about a digital project, you’ve probably heard me mention Cloudflare. It comes up every time. It is the default infrastructure layer in almost everything I build at LiwoxDotNet.
This post explains what Cloudflare actually is — without the marketing language — and why I keep reaching for it.
What Cloudflare is
Cloudflare is a network infrastructure company with servers in over 300 cities worldwide. When you use Cloudflare for a website or application, your content is served from whichever of those 300+ locations is closest to your user.
This is called a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and the practical effect is dramatic: a user in Lagos getting content from a server in Lagos rather than a server in London. The difference in load time is not subtle — it can be the difference between a page loading in half a second and taking three seconds.
But a CDN is the least interesting thing Cloudflare does.
Cloudflare Pages
Cloudflare Pages is a hosting platform for static websites and web applications. You connect your GitHub repository, configure a build command, and every push to your main branch triggers an automatic build and deployment.
The result is deployed to Cloudflare’s global network — not a single server, not a single region. Every user gets the closest edge node. Performance is excellent by default.
For API routes — contact forms, newsletter endpoints, server-side logic — Cloudflare Pages integrates with Workers, so server-side functions run at the edge too. No separate infrastructure, no region to select.
I use Cloudflare Pages for the LiwoxDotNet platform itself, for client websites, and for any project where the primary delivery is web content.
Cloudflare Workers
Workers is Cloudflare’s serverless compute platform. You write JavaScript (or TypeScript, Python, Rust) and it runs on Cloudflare’s edge network — in the server location closest to whoever made the request.
This is different from traditional serverless functions (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions) in one important way: there are no cold starts. Workers are always warm, always fast. For latency-sensitive applications — APIs, real-time data, financial systems — this matters.
Workers is what makes the Forex Delight trading platform’s real-time data pipeline possible. Trade data from MetaTrader 5 hits a Workers endpoint, gets processed, and lands in the database — all at the edge, with response times under 500ms.
Cloudflare DNS
Cloudflare’s DNS is the fastest authoritative DNS in the world by most independent benchmarks. Beyond speed, it gives you:
- Proxy mode: Traffic routes through Cloudflare, hiding your origin server’s IP and enabling all the CDN and security features
- DDoS protection: Cloudflare absorbs attack traffic before it reaches your infrastructure
- SSL/TLS: Automatic certificate provisioning and renewal, no manual setup
For any domain I manage, the DNS moves to Cloudflare immediately.
Cloudflare R2
R2 is Cloudflare’s object storage — similar to AWS S3, but with no egress fees. Storing and serving files from R2 costs the same regardless of how much bandwidth they consume. For media-heavy projects (Liwox Music, for example), this matters significantly.
Why I default to Cloudflare
The honest answer is operational simplicity.
A Cloudflare-native stack — Pages, Workers, D1, R2 — is a complete infrastructure platform with no servers to manage, no regions to configure, no patching, and no egress costs. The free tier covers most projects through launch and early growth. The paid tiers are reasonably priced.
More importantly, Cloudflare’s tools integrate with each other cleanly. Workers can read from D1, write to R2, send emails via Email Workers, and deploy as part of a Pages project. There is no glue infrastructure connecting disparate services.
That simplicity is worth a lot when you’re building fast and operating with a small team.
If you want to understand whether Cloudflare is the right fit for your project, get in touch and I’ll give you an honest assessment.