For those still involved with Bubble, they have launched CloudFlare optimisation for existing users.
Finally in the right direction but will only help with static content. They will still have the issue of slow loading data and workflows.
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I’ve been following this closely. Actually I was already using Cloudflare with my bubble apps in the past. Then Bubble made a change and broke it. I was told Bubble didn’t play well with Cloudflare so I stopped using Cloudflare with Bubble.
So actually what they have done is fixed said compatibility. Although now you can’t configure anything on your side on Cloudflare.
Again it’s all in Bubble hands.
It’s great for those that want to see some kind of improvement in loading static content, but again you are delegating further control to Bubble.
Actually I am not going to change to Cloudflare because I will have to add and make the www subdomain the main point of entry. It seems that bare/naked/root domains do not play well with this integration.
I thought that would be the case but decided not to mention it. A shame that they won’t allow more advanced users access to Cloudlfare settings, but then again, that’s one of the pro’s and con’s of a managed platform.
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Its not difficult to set-up CloudFlare, and the basic account is free. There you will have full access to all the settings you need. No need to rely on a piece of software to do this for you… I don’t understand what makes it so difficult? Pardon my ignorance.
I was merely discussing the fact that Bubble allows you no control over Cloudflare, no problem with Wappler as you can create an account and change whatever you like.
We are talking specifically about Bubble. They know performance is one of their weak points so they are trying to improve it. Cloudflare will indeed help people to improve performance on static content all over the world.
The shared cluster of Bubble is hosted in EC2 East so the CDN will help there.
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Hey Max,
Sorry didn’t mean to come across the wrong way. I’ve never used Bubble so have no idea of the short-falls of it.
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That’s ok Dave, I’d be interested to know just how many people have moved over from Bubble to Wappler. Maybe time for a poll?
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I believe there are quite a few Bubble users who have migrated recently. Wappler is growing in popularity at an amazing rate.
Hopefully once they have the database management integration more will come.
But to be honest the one thing that makes the real difference is the hosting infrastructure thingy. You can write as many tutorials as you like, try to convince people that hosting is easy. But webflow, bubble and all those are so popular because you don’t have to care about infrastructure. That’s a fact 
I am very happy that the team is focusing on the foundations of Wappler by integrating very wisely well proven technologies. But eventually If Wappler wants to reach the masses they will have to manage hosting.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years time we have an additional subscription tier that provides the editor and hosting completely integrated.
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Bubbler that’s evaluating Wappler here. I want to bring the conversation up a bit from databases and infrastructure to the philosophical difference I have between what Bubble offers and what Wappler does.
Simply put, I want to spend as much of my time building value to my customers and my business as possible. Managing infrastructure and fiddling with databases are not value-add activities, so I want to minimize the amount of time I have to deal with such things. There’s a trade off associated, of course, and the only reason I’m here poking around is because the downside of Bubble (performance and scalability) is eating into the upside of not having to learn or deal with things below the value line. To be determined how much Cloudflare helps here.
For me, and many people like me, Bubble outages wouldn’t be any different than an outage on my own hosting provider because I’d have no idea what to do. Turn it off, turn it back on? Likely, I’d have to call an engineer friend and fork over some cash to get it figured out. Either way, I’m at the mercy of someone else, and I’m optimizing for ease-of-use on my end.
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Hi Andrew,
Its really not that time consuming to setup your database and the tables and columns you need.
Maybe it sounds scary if you don’t have any knowledge/experience, but imagine setting up a table in Excel or Access. Then you don’t have to deal with anything else on your hosting, especially if you are not building the second Facebook
And that will soon be possible with the visual database builder coming to Wappler
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I’ve never used Bubble, but I would suggest you look into managed hosting where you don’t have to worry about turning things on or off etc. - though you’ll probably be able to manage most things with cPanel (or similar).
There are lots of very reliable hosting companies. If there is ever an issue with the one I use, I email support and usually get a reply within two minutes. I expect most hosting companies make available there uptime status etc. I would check this and if it’s not very close to 100% every month, you should probably look elsewhere.
not sure what Cloudflare have to do with hosting ant database?
Cloudflare is just a fancy firewall and CDN that you probably don’t need
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@Teodor that’s why I’m still here lurking 
I’m excited about what Wappler can do!
@TomD I’m dealing with enterprise software all day at my day job, so I’m probably more gun-shy about this than I should be. My entire job focuses around implementing PaaS solutions for large customers, so I think I know just enough about all the complexities to be absolutely terrified lol
@George Cloudfare doesn’t have anything to do with those, but it is impacting one of the weakest parts of Bubble (performance). I realize how I phrased things didn’t make my thinking clear on that topic.
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For me, understanding hosting has been one of the hardest aspects of evaluating Wappler. From a business owner’s perspective, in particular, it seems hard to get my head around how much hosting is going to cost, which has been a roadblock to me migrating to Wappler.
The integration with Docker seems really cool! I feel like I’m just now starting to understand what docker is and the benefits it can add but this also creates more confusion over hosting. It appears that we need to find special hosting if we want to use Docker. However, hosting expenses seem to vary depending on time on the server instead of a flat fee, which is confusing.
Here are some questions that I have been spending a lot of time investigating BEFORE I start the 7 day trial on Wappler:
- Where do I host it? Which providers? Hostgator (current hosting), Heroku, AWS EC2 w/Beanstalk?
- What’s the difference between standard hosting and Docker hosting?
- Do I need to manage a server?
- How do I budget for hosting expenses? What factors affect pricing? Time? Speed?
- I need a SSL certificate since I have a .app domain. Where do I get that? How much will it cost?
- What developer tools should I be using and how do they work? Code editor? Database creator? Git? Github?
Wappler is considerably more expensive than what I currently pay at Bubble: $65 USD compared to $16 USD monthly. But even more important, I don’t even know what to expect for hosting expenses, which scares me. It seems like a Wappler setup with our own hosting is a much better long-term strategy, it’s just that there are some pretty big financial unknowns.
Also, statements like “It’s easy”, “that’s not part of Wappler”, “It’s industry standard” don’t help the cause for business owners looking to quickly make a business decision about switching to Wappler. I get that most of the people on this forum are developers and you probably find these basic questions annoying, but even just a little bit of help bridging the gap from technologist to business owner would be extremely helpful. I’m not ragging on anyone, just trying to give helpful feedback that will hopefully increase the adoption of Wappler.
I am thankful to @JonL who is going through the migration process (Bubble-> Wappler) and taking us along for the ride and so much more could be done similar to his efforts.
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Which one do you use? What do you like about them? What don’t you like about them?
I actually don’t understand where Cloudflare fits into the big picture of all the providers/tools we would need to use along with Wappler.
https://www.cloudways.com/ is quite a popular option for managed hosting. I haven’t used them as I feel comfortable fiddling with the infrastructure side but I have heard good things about them.
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I’ve used ServerPilot before. So easy to connect to a VPS. MySQL database and SSL certificate on one click.
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