About

Milkshake is a free website builder that allows customers to create mobile-optimized websites from their smartphones. Customers can select from a variety of templates or customize with text, images, GIFs, YouTube videos, and more without needing any web development skills. The app, which hosts +3M websites is a convenient tool for content creators, influencers, and business owners to increase online presence and engage audiences.

How they use Cloudflare

With high traffic comes higher hosting costs for managing servers. When the Milkshake app started to grow, the team needed to keep things super efficient to keep costs down. The team decided on exporting a CSS / JS / and HTML file on the backend while using Cloudflare Pages to host the front end.

On the backend, they use Cloudflare R2 to store data. After building their own migration tool (prior or Super Slurper being available), they were able to migrate 15 TB of Images from S3 over to R2.

The Milkshake team also uses Cloudflare Workers as a routing layer between R2 and AWS with a Worker involved to retrieve assets from R2. If the asset is not available, the requests are then sent to AWS. The team also built a personalized analytics engine via Workers that collects user website info on page views, stats and user behavior.

Why Cloudflare?

“When we took over Milkshake, we had to figure out how to cover costs once they transitioned the ownership. They historically used AWS for S3 + Cloudfront and to run the infrastructure out the gate we were quoted $20K /month.

“The Cloudflare Workers pricing model made it possible for us to continue and grow. So we re-platformed the whole app and put our infrastructure behind Cloudflare.”