Edge or on-premise? Why the answer is usually both

The edge-vs-on-premise debate is usually framed as either/or. In practice, the strongest setups are hybrid.

Run at the edge when…

Your workload is public, latency-sensitive and globally distributed — marketing sites, storefronts, APIs. Cloudflare’s 300+ cities give sub-50ms almost anywhere.

Self-host when…

Data residency, privacy or cost control matter — sensitive databases, internal tools, media archives. Proxmox or ZimaOS on your own hardware, secured with a Cloudflare zero-trust tunnel.

The tunnel is the bridge: public speed at the edge, private control on-prem, connected securely.

See how we visualise this on the hosting page.