Why Drupflare

Across a fleet, a Drupflare site costs about 0.6 cents a month in infrastructure. A VPS that answers visitors from nearby needs a server in each of three regions behind a load balancer, which is $58.20 a month per site. For 1,000 sites with 10,000 views each, that is $58,200 a month against $5.80 for Drupflare, a 10,037x difference before anyone has written a line of code. Against Pantheon Basic, the same thousand sites would be $41,667 a month, a 7,186x difference.

On your own Cloudflare account there is no per-site fee at all. The free plan covers 3.04 million views a month on the one-click deploy and up to 13.2 million with the R2 page mirror, shared across every site you run. Past that, the $5 Workers Paid plan carries a thousand sites of 10,000 views each for $5.80 a month.

A VPS answers from one region. Drupflare answers from the Cloudflare location nearest each visitor. Anyone on the same continent as your server gets their page 6.35x faster, and the gap keeps growing with distance, up to 23.09x on the far side of the world.

On the same machine, serving the same Drupal site, a cached page's slowest 5% came back 12.25x faster on Drupflare than on nginx with PHP-FPM, 4 ms against 49, and with 32 visitors at once Drupflare answered 3.59x as many requests a second, 438 against 122.

The interpreter starts in a few milliseconds, and a logged-in editor is served from a compiled plan that skips the render entirely once their session settles.

A conventional host draws power all day whether anyone visits or not, and production Drupal is usually sized for its busiest hour. A Drupflare site uses a processor only while it answers a request. When nobody is visiting, it holds no compute at all.

Against three regions with a high-availability pair in each, sized for peak, that is 99.99% less energy (modelled): 390 kWh a year for the servers against under 0.1 kWh for Drupflare at a million views a month, logged-in visitors included. At 10,000 views a month the gap widens to 742,503x, because the same servers spread their idle draw over far fewer visitors. Each site avoids about 150 kg of CO2e and 1.9 kL of water a year (derived), and a logged-in editor's admin page takes a third less energy per view (measured).

The fleet comparison is smaller and still large: for a thousand sites of 10,000 views each, 99.97% less energy than consolidated shared hosting behind a CDN, with 701 kg of CO2 avoided a year on the average US grid and 8,989 litres of water (derived). These figures stop at the data centre; the visitor's side is the spool claim below, measured separately.

Drupflare ships a small service worker, spool, that keeps a copy of the pages a visitor has seen and answers their repeat views on the device. On two deployed sites that differed only in spool, 48 of 48 repeat views made no network request, against one to six without it (measured). A repeat view used 0.53 J on a desktop processor against 1.29 J (measured). A first view of a page with an image, a video and an embedded player used 12.9 J against 32.8 J, almost all of it saved by swapping the embed for a click-to-load facade (measured on one synthetic page, on a desktop and not a phone).

Spool costs the server about 5 ms of CPU per page and adds about two requests per new visitor. It only pays off for visitors who read several pages (it breaks even at four views per visitor), so it is on for paid sites and off for free ones (measured, derived, modelled). The energy report shows the rows behind each figure and where they don't move.

This is Drupal 11 on PHP 8.5, with every extension Drupal needs. Webform, Paragraphs, Search API, Metatag, Pathauto, OpenID Connect, Redis and dozens more are verified by enabling them on a live site and checking what they do, and the list grows every release. The fixtures page lists every one, with how it was checked.

Existing sites can move over with drangler, which surveys the site first and tells you what will break before you start. Leaving is just as easy: every site exports its own database.

There is no operating system, web server or PHP-FPM pool to keep up to date. Cloudflare runs the platform, and a site you are not using costs nothing to keep. When logged-in traffic grows, read replicas spread it across more objects without anyone reconfiguring anything.