After running TechLatest on traditional hosting for years, here's what changed when I shifted to Cloudflare Workers and Pages — and what I learned building MSDL and FPS Calculator on the edge.

Why I Moved Everything to Cloudflare's Edge

After running TechLatest on managed WordPress hosting for years, I started noticing a pattern: the more I tried to optimise the server, the more I was fighting the infrastructure instead of building things.

When I started building my own tools — MSDL, FPS Calculator, Minxlink — I had a choice to make on where they'd live. I went all-in on Cloudflare, and it changed how I think about deployment entirely.

The latency problem no one talks about

A reader in Mumbai hitting a server in Frankfurt adds 120–200ms of latency before a single byte is sent. On a WordPress blog that's bad enough. On a tool where someone is waiting for an API response, it's the difference between "fast" and "feels broken."

Edge workers execute in the data centre closest to the user. That Mumbai reader now gets sub-10ms response times on static routes.

MSDL: a Go backend behind a Worker

The MSDL backend is a Go service that parses Microsoft's session API and returns ISO download URLs. The Go service lives on a VPS; a Cloudflare Worker sits in front of it and handles:

Caching session tokens (5-minute TTL)
Rate limiting by IP
Serving the React frontend from Pages

The Go service only gets hit on cache misses. 95% of requests are served from Worker memory.

FPS Calculator: edge-friendly FastAPI

FastAPI doesn't run natively on Workers (Python runtime is experimental), so FPS Calculator uses a different split: the FastAPI backend lives behind Cloudflare Tunnels on a Coolify VPS, with Workers handling the CDN layer and edge caching for hot queries (popular CPU+GPU combos).

The cache-hit rate on benchmark queries is about 80%, which means 80% of users never touch the Python service.

What I'd change

The @cloudflare/next-on-pages adapter still has rough edges — some Next.js features need export const runtime = 'edge' annotations you don't know you've missed until the build fails. OpenNext is the better path going forward.

But the core idea — run as close to the user as possible — has completely changed how I size and architect services.