- Zac.Direct is registered via Squarespace Domains
- Site content is generated via Hugo
- Infrastructure is provisioned via Pulumi
- Site content is hosted directly on Azure Blob Storage
- Content is load balanced and provided free SSL certificate via Cloudflare's Content Delivery Network
- The Azure hosting bill for this site is estimated to run $2.06 annually. If you're not using services like these, you should be!
- The contact form, bot protection, and hosting complexities are all free from Formspree
Azure is sadly moving away from stand-alone CDN offerings. Opting instead to put it behind the Front Door SKUs. If you have any other Azure infrastructure at all I would consider extending the Pulumi code here to provision a Front Door instance and use it. You could provision 100% of this inside of a Pulumi project, and Front Door is a solid competitor to Cloudflare.
For my purposes, this site's hosting cost has been approximately $5.00 for the last 5 years. The basic SKU of Azure Front Door being $35/month removes it from consideration for me, and honestly highlights how great Cloudflare is for committing to a free tier for the last decade or so, and promising that they always will.
Pulumi offers a Cloudflare provider, and the full infrastructure provisioning could still be completed entirely with infrastructure-as-code. I'm manually provisioning it mainly because there is not yet an OpenID provider for Pulumi ESC to login to Cloudflare. Pulumi and Cloudflare both innovate quickly and the generic connector capability is there, and so I expect that might change at some point. For now, the trade off of having to keep a security token rotated instead of handle dynamic logins like I am doing for GitHub and Azure just isn't worth it. If I had multiple domains or wanted the ability to do ephemeral sites for A/B testing features I would elect to manage the Cloudflare infra in this project. It's too much to justify for a blog that I forget I have for years at a time.