How one developer monitors 120 websites for free using Cloudflare's free tier
A developer built a web tool called 'itsnotyou.site' that determines whether a site outage stems from the user's connection or the website itself by running parallel checks from both the browser and Cloudflare's edge network. The entire system — including uptime monitoring for around 120 sites, 24-hour history, status pages, and outage alerts — operates at no cost on Cloudflare's free tier. The key engineering challenge was staying within Cloudflare's limit of 1,000 KV writes per day, solved by storing all 120 site statuses in a single data blob and offloading background sweeps to an existing VPS. A real-time visitor counter was moved to Cloudflare's Analytics Engine to prevent user traffic spikes from consuming the write budget reserved for the status monitor. The developer acknowledged that while Cloudflare costs nothing, the background sweep relies on a separately paid VPS, making the 'zero cost' claim partially conditional on existing infrastructure.
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