Server Islands: Static, but Dynamic

This is where it’s really super cool. Most of the site is totally static (SSG) for speed, but we use Astro Server Islands for the parts that need to be alive

The website is totally static, except for the parts that actually do things. This setup is super cool because it gives us the speed of a static site with the power of a live backend.

How the Astro Islands Work

The blog post itself is delivered instantly via Cloudflare as pure HTML/CSS.

The comments section (a Server Island) is "deferred." It only fetches real data from our private VPS when the user actually scrolls to it.

The form runs as a server island and uses Cloudflare as a relay to send requests to the VPS.

This completely obscures our Payload CMS VPS IP address. Even if someone knows the admin URL, the backend is practically invisible to the outside world. Security by isolation!