Hosting choice

[Vsevolod-Rusinskiy]

New ADR-0029 to migrate the Polkadot/Substrate portal to Cloudflare Pages.

Close #677

[khssnv]

As far as I remember, when setting up hosting on Cloudflare it shows a badge discouraging new projects from starting on Pages and recommending Workers instead. Please explain why we are not following the vendor's recommendation - what exactly is too complicated, what didn’t work for us, or what the reason was. Thanks!

[aardbol]

As far as I remember, when setting up hosting on Cloudflare it shows a badge discouraging new projects from starting on Pages and recommending Workers instead. Please explain why we are not following the vendor's recommendation - what exactly is too complicated, what didn’t work for us, or what the reason was. Thanks!

Where do you see such a message? I didn't see anything like that

[Vsevolod-Rusinskiy]

@khssnv As I understand it, our project (a fork of polkadot-js/apps) is a fully static SPA with no SSR, no APIs, and no edge logic. All we need from the hosting side is static file delivery, CI/CD, and preview deployments. Cloudflare Pages provides all of this natively and without additional infrastructure.

Using Workers in our case doesn’t leverage their strengths and effectively becomes just a thin layer that serves static files without any logic.

Workers also introduce additional complexity: maintaining wrangler.toml, configuring the worker itself, asset binding, custom domain routes, creating and cleaning up temporary preview workers, and extra CI/CD logic — all of which Pages handles automatically.

[khssnv]

Where do you see such a message? I didn't see anything like that

@aardbol, was on a "Get started" page, see #547 (comment)

Also there is an article, https://blog.cloudflare.com/pages-and-workers-are-converging-into-one-experience/. But I didn't find any indication that Pages is EOL so it seems safe to use it.

@Vsevolod-Rusinskiy, thank you, please add these considerations to the ADR.