givan's point about PHP hosting being cheap and frictionless is true in most markets, but it breaks down once you factor in where the server actually sits. Most affordable shared hosting — even from providers popular in East Africa — routes traffic through data centers in Europe or the US. For users on 3G connections in Nairobi, that adds 300-500ms before a single byte loads, which no amount of caching fully fixes. The "cheap WordPress hosting" calculation looks very different when your audience is 8000km from the server.

EmDash on Workers doesn't solve the content editor experience problem (that's real and unsolved), but the performance and cost math genuinely changes in markets where Cloudflare has local infrastructure and affordable traditional hosting doesn't. There's a related thread up on HN right now that goes into the Astro + D1 + R2 stack from exactly this angle — worth a look if the emerging market performance question interests you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702649

Detailed breakdown of the Astro + Cloudflare Workers + D1 + R2 stack, with a specific focus on how the edge deployment model changes the performance and cost calculus for markets like East Africa — where Cloudflare's Nairobi and Mombasa PoPs make a measurable difference over traditional hosted WordPress.