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Case study · Edge & cost

Less spend. Same speed.

Caching a large travel site at the Cloudflare edge, filtering bot traffic and shrinking builds, after hosting costs led the provider to suspend the project.

Own productTravel discovery platformGlobal

The challenge

Traffic grew.
So did the bill.

The platform ran on Vercel. As pages and traffic grew, so did function invocations, edge requests and build minutes. The account was eventually suspended for overspend.

A large share of the cost was avoidable. Most pages rarely changed, but they were being rendered and built far more often than needed. Bots and analytics calls also made up a large share of requests.

The approach

Cache at the edge.
Build only what’s needed.

Most pages on a travel content site change slowly. They should be served from cache, not rebuilt or re-rendered on every request.

  1. Cache HTML at the edge.

    Serve public pages from Cloudflare with long cache lifetimes and stale-while-revalidate, and warm the cache from the sitemap after each release.

  2. Purge safely.

    Purge and re-warm only after the new build is confirmed live, so crawlers never see missing assets.

  3. Filter and sample.

    Filter bot traffic and sample analytics requests, which had become a large share of edge traffic.

  4. Build less.

    Prerender only the languages that are really translated, and move to a prebuilt deploy pipeline that avoids paid build minutes.

What changed

A site that costs what it should.

The platform runs within budget, and fast pages come from cache.

Reduction in edge requests
98%+
Smaller builds
~12×
Paid builds avoided per month
~120

Back online, within budget

Hosting costs controlled after the provider suspended the project for overspend.

Edge-first delivery

Public pages served from Cloudflare cache.

Search-safe releases

No more crawler errors from stale assets after deploys.

Ross’s role

Own product

Ross diagnosed the cost problem and designed the caching, build and deployment changes as founder of the platform.

  • Cloudflare
  • Vercel
  • Next.js
  • Edge caching
  • CI/CD

Published October 2026 · By

A potential collaboration

Cut hosting costs without slowing down.

For Next.js and content sites on Vercel, Netlify or similar platforms where costs are rising with traffic.

  • A hosting cost and caching review.
  • Cloudflare edge caching and purge setup.
  • Build and deployment optimisation.
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