Why we moved SchoolHouse Logistics to Cloudflare
SHL now runs on Cloudflare. A look at what changed, what stayed put, and the checks that mattered more than a successful deployment.
By Jeff Carstens · AI in practice · Published 2026-10-23
Moving a website sounds tidy when you describe it afterward: choose a host, change a few settings, point the domain at it. Our move to Cloudflare included all of that. It also included database connection timeouts, a restore rehearsal, and checking that a form’s success message meant something had actually happened.
Where SHL runs now
SchoolHouse Logistics completed its move to Cloudflare on October 23, 2026. The website and its application requests now run through a Cloudflare Worker. Our previous hosting service has been stopped, and we kept the migration records and backups.
Cloudflare is now the hosting reference we’ll use in our learning resources. It gives us a concrete setup to explain from our own site: the domain that brings someone here, the files their browser loads, and the application that handles a request. We can write about those pieces using decisions we actually made.
That’s a useful basis for a recommendation. It still leaves room for a different answer on a different project. A host needs to fit the software you have, the services it connects to, and the work you’re prepared to maintain.
We kept the database where it was
One decision made the move easier to reason about: the database stayed in the existing Prisma Postgres project. Changing where the application runs didn’t require moving all of its stored information at the same time.
There was still a connection problem to solve. Earlier connection paths produced intermittent readiness timeouts. The migration record documents that Cloudflare Hyperdrive resolved those failures, and readiness checks passed before and after the old service stopped. Hyperdrive helps Workers connect to existing databases; it isn’t where our database is stored.
That distinction matters if you’re following along with an AI assistant. ‘Move us to Cloudflare’ is a large instruction. Ask it to list which pieces move, which stay, and how the connections between them change. You want to be able to point at the database on the diagram and say where it lives.
A green build was one checkpoint
The new host needed to build and serve the site. Then the ordinary work needed to survive the move: opening a lesson directly, signing in, reading saved progress, submitting a form, and opening the admin dashboard. Those checks tell you more than a homepage loading once.
Before the move, a database backup was restored into a disposable local database and the table counts were compared. That gave us evidence that the saved copy could be read and restored. It didn’t prove every possible recovery scenario, but it was a more useful check than simply seeing a backup file in a folder.
We also checked the site again after the former host stopped. That’s an easy step to overlook. While both environments exist, a working page can leave you wondering which one actually served it.
What I’d take into the next move
Write down the current setup before changing it. Keep a usable copy of the information you can’t afford to lose. Move as few independent pieces at once as you reasonably can. Decide what a successful move looks like in terms of things a visitor can do.
If you’re building your first website, you don’t need to reproduce SHL’s whole setup. A site made of public pages has different needs from an application with accounts and stored progress. Start with the hosting instructions for the kind of project you have, and introduce more services when you can explain why they’re needed.
We’ll use Cloudflare in future examples and keep talking about the work around it: checking access, tracking costs, testing changes, and recovering when something goes wrong. Those are the parts of a hosting choice that continue after launch day.
Sources and further reading
- Cloudflare Workers: platform documentation
- Cloudflare Hyperdrive: connecting Workers to existing databases
Jeff runs SchoolHouse Logistics and writes about building with AI and choosing useful tools for schools.