Cloudflare launches web hosting service Cloudflare Pages

US web infrastructure firm Cloudflare has devised its own tool that lets web developers build and host websites.

Taking advantage of the company’s global infrastructure network, Cloudflare Pages is a hosting service that supports platforms built directly on the edge using the JAMstack architecture.

The firm has described this as “the next breakthrough in the web performance battle” due to the way it takes advantage of edge computing, with Cloudflare claiming performance will be almost twice as fast as other platforms.

Beyond this, Cloudflare also suggests its Pages service will be secure and scalable, saving developers time on integrated disparate systems, as well as benefitting from seamless GitHub integration to ease the development process.

“From day one Cloudflare was built to service developers. Over the last ten years, millions of developers have counted on us for our network performance and security services,” said Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO and co-founder. “With Cloudflare Pages, we're now providing them with a scalable, fast, secure, cost-effective platform to build next-generation applications that they can deploy globally.

“Internally, we believe it's only a matter of time before an individual developer builds a billion-dollar company on their own. We hope Cloudflare Pages will provide the building blocks to help make our belief a reality.”

Its scalability can be attributed to the fact it’s built on Cloudflare’s global network of more than 200 cities, the company added, while running on the edge means Pages will be within 100 milliseconds of 99% of the internet-connected population.

The firm is also hoping to soon integrate Cloudflare Pages with its Cloudflare Workers serverless development platform, so users can integrate third-party APIs into their own platforms. This will allow frontend developers versed in JavaScript to build scalable backends to their applications in the same language.

The security of the platform, meanwhile, is being assured with free SSL as standard, alongside the firm’s Web Application Firewall (WAF). The company will also provide support for the latest web standards with HTTP/3, the QUIC transport layer network protocol, and image compression.