Netlify is fantastic. It simplifies deployment and delivery of the websites dramatically. What Heroku did for app development, they did for websites. And even though they are nominally static websites, you can wire them with React or Vue and still have apps.
Agreed. I've switched out my complicated GitHub+S3+CloudFront+Cloudflare for static hosting to Netlify. Netlify also handles some of the stuff you don't even think about - e.g. partial deploy failure. With my past scripts I might push `index.html`, lose network, error out, etc, and not push the updated `assets/blah.css`.
They're a static site web host. You deploy using git, and they handle pulling your site from git and deploying it to a CDN. If you're using a static site engine like Hugo or Jekyll, they'll build the site for you as well.
I think what people are excited about is deploying a JavaScript-based frontend (probably written in React or Vue.js) using Netlify, so the client-side code is quickly distributed and accessible.
Building Javascript-based frontends are already compiling to static assets, which Netlify could already host. JAMstack is about having the javascript front-end call APIs on the backend. This is about creating an environment for all the back-end functions to be in one place, possibly with the front-end deployment. Not sure how it is going to be implemented though.
Ok, I'm a web dev and I hate having to deal with web servers, configs, CI, etc. The idea sounds great, but I can't understand how this works from this post.
Can someone explain how this works exactly? Are they basically offering a way to prebuild apps to static assets and host them on CDNs? How do server-side only things will happen then?
Think Heroku but just for deploying static assets. You can do something as simple as have a git repo of assets, push it, and you're up and running with SSL, etc, straight away.
How do you get dynamic? Well, they support a build process so static sites or assets can be built at their end, if that's how you roll. But if you want fully dynamic sites, well, no, you can use their AWS Lambda-powered functions service to help build this out, but you won't be deploying something like a PHP or Rails app to Netlify :-) This limitation opens up a lot of other opportunities to simplify deployment, however.
And if your main dynamic features are things like handling forms or an occasional db call on the backend, this isn't a bad approach. It's cheaper and less maintenance generally for a lot of simple cases, but obviously won't apply to all cases equally well.
Databases are, in general, the next obvious question for a dynamic app on Netlify. Some solutions can use lambdas, but since a straight-up database is always going to be necessary for certain things, it makes me wonder if they'd roll out a paid database at some point... though that sort of conflicts with their "JAM" "no backend! well somebody else's backend maybe?" selling point
Their main offering is 0 config static hosting. They also added a CI service to build your frontend for you and then deploy it.
Then they have myriad other value added features, one of which is cloud functions. You can use that for your server side requirements, or you can use your own server.
It’s not what they do that’s special, it’s how easy/magical they make the process (as well as the very generous free tier).
> Are they basically offering a way to prebuild apps to static assets and host them on CDNs?
Yes. Pretty much. They're a more dev friendly CloudFront. Supports deploying from a git repo out-of-the-box, where there's a separate service for this with CloudFront. More expensive than CloudFront, though.
> How do server-side only things will happen then?
This isn't the main problem they're solving. They expect that you'll have an API somewhere to talk to. But they do have a "functions" feature, which is based on AWS Lambda, so you could use that for things that would otherwise fall under server-side. They also have a simple "forms" feature for basic data collection.
You can keep a static site with something like Hugo in a git repo and have Netlify automatically build it and make it available on changes. You can also just toss an HTML and CSS file in (like I do on https://unstuckdev.com/) and their robots put it up.
You can do more with it, and that's what costs money, but it takes a small but tedious hurdle out of putting some HTML on the web.
It's because most of it is marketing speak. I suppose they don't want to call it a better GitHub pages with awesome UX, but rather invent a new category term. In the tech sector if it sticks then it's pure gold.
I've set up a landing page recently and it was flawless on Netlify. You provide a Git repo, connect it to their CI then give some build commands and they will handle the rest.
They still host it on regular servers obviously, but you don't have to do anything to manage it. They have a DNS server which is also pretty neat.
> How do server-side only things will happen then?
By calling a service from JavaScript. What you're probably getting at is, how do I dynamically generate web pages?
That's different. As a web developer you're probably used to generating the presentation tier on the server at least some of the time. You query a database and spit out some HTML. The so-called "static" approach here means:
1. Generate more stuff up front with build tools that you previously would do at request time. For example, why write server code to generate and cache a blog on every request when you can just build it whenever you write a new blog post?
2. In many cases this greatly narrows down the dynamic stuff that might need to happen. See if you can use JavaScript to fill in the rest. Instead of inserting that ad banner with server code, write a JavaScript function to fetch it from a service (like Lambda) and update the DOM.
3. You can be as dynamic as you want to be by expanding on what you do with JavaScript and services. This is sometimes called writing a single page app. It's maybe more complicated but on the plus side, it's how you write mobile apps and you may be able to share the same backend.
May not be widely known, but a startup named Divshot launched what feels to me now like an identical service to Netlify, just a few years earlier. Existed ~2012-2015. They were acquired by Google and their product was converted into Firebase Hosting. I haven't tried it, though:
I loved using Divshot, and was sad when their service was shuttered.
I’ve been using Netlify ever since, though, and have launched 20+ web projects in the past 18 months. Easily my favorite hosting solution I’ve ever used.
I love Firebase Hosting probably just as much as Netlify. Even more if you consider the various services besides hosting that Firebase offers. Thank you for making a great product! And if you're hiring, my email is in my profile :D
I use Firebase hosting for a static site that gets between 100-400gb of traffic per month, and it works out a bit cheaper than Netlify ($15-$50/m vs. flat $45/m). I hardly ever use their web interface and just deal with their one line CLI.
My biggest concern with Firebase is if it's still going to be around in a year or two. That's why I'd be reluctant to use it for DB and auth stuff. I narrowly avoided jumping into Parse back in the day before that was shuttered so I'm wary.
I think most of the concern comes from Google shutting down services and apis pretty regularly. I wouldn't use it for large projects or long term projects because of how differently you need to write things to effectively work with it.
It seems like more and more services are being moved under the Firebase umbrella (Crashlytics for example), signalling Google is committed long term to Firebase. It is a considerable form of cloud lock-in if you get your data into Firebase (firestore) and a competitive advantage over AWS, so there is good reason to believe this is long term strategy as well.
Firebase is just awesome. I have deployed several minor apps on the platform. With out-of-the-box auth management and the db, I can have a static client-side only app that is relatively featured. I used to actually "code server side" to manage data, and that seems so redundant now with firebase. Thanks!
FYI to any readers: Firebase Hosting has nothing to do with the other Firebase stuff. In fact, I personally dislike their live database quite a bit.
If you want to host a simple static site with HTTPS, Firebase Hosting really makes it incredibly easy. My only complaint is that they don't let you view access logs. Here's the official response [0] from the Firebase team as to why that's the case.
Once you have to do anything more complex I think it's better to use a different service. If you don't want to host anything yourself I've heard positive things about Zeit [1], although I haven't personally used it.
FWIW providing access logs is something we're exploring (though it's still a ways out).
I certainly hope that you don't feel the need to move to something else when your application scales / gets more complex -- our whole mission is to make it so you don't have to. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@mbleigh) if you have specific questions/concerns.
The pricing seems a bit weird. I'm dubious about hosting something semi-important on the free tier, but the first paid price point is $45, which seems too high for easier static hosting.
On the free tier you're just hosting static files on Netlify, so they can cache very effectively. Also since you're just hosting a set of static files you're hardly "locked in", so if for whatever reason the free tier stops being appealing you can just move on to a different provider.
I've had a site on the free tier for about a month now and have had zero issues. Page speed is great. It was easy to set up. I don't have a need for any of the paid features anytime soon and don't plan on upgrading. I've been recommending them to anyone who will listen.
It almost seems too good to be true but as other people have pointed out when its just static content their costs are so low. Since I don't use anything special on their platform, if anything ever happens migrating away should be a breeze too.
I asked them once, and they seemed pretty adamant about not hosting content. Then again, with the IPFS gateway they just added, you can pretty easily do that.
We started out bootstrapping and were profitable before our first round of funding. However, we always strongly believed that the larger vision of what we wanted to build would be impossible to achieve without outside funding.
How did you decide when it was time to stop bootstrapping and raise a round? Was there a magic number traction-wise (total users, MRR, etc) or was it motivated by the desire to staff up a team and execute on your product vision?
Not a ton. But the idea here is you use javascript to call an API for your dynamic content. This way your javascript/css/images are all setup on a CDN that you don't have to manage.
In our case, we moved a blog from WP to a static Gatsby.js site. It's hosted on Netlify and all content is driven by Contentful where updates trigger a webhook on Netlify to rebuild the blog (new posts are pulled during this build process).
So now you're using 2 different services to host a site, instead of just using hosted Wordpress (or squarespace, wix, etc). Does Contentful provide the same content editing experience? What are the advantages here?
The advantage is that the resulting website being just static pages will be much faster and secure that your hosted wordpress. And compared to wix etc, you have a lot more control on the appearance and structure of your website, because you can use wathever static website builder you choose
How is it more secure when you're still accessing an API? Wordpress itself might not be the best product but other fully-hosted services are all the same, whether they render the site or just give you an API.
A CDN is equally fast when the content is cached, and if you're building the entire site as static pages then it's not really a dynamic site in the first place and can also be done with HTML or markdown in the same repo.
The fine control seems the be the only real advantage, at the cost of more moving pieces.
If you're using Contentful then how is that different or better than wordpress or any hosted system that is made for writing posts?
The only 2 advantages of splitting this into separate systems is extra customization (even though hosted solutions are already very flexible) and compiling the entire site into static files. The 2nd seems to be more of a thing for devs to enjoy rather than something that makes a real difference to users, especially when you're already using a CDN.
> How is it more secure when you're still accessing an API?
It only accesses the API with a read-only token during the build process.
> it's not really a dynamic site in the first place and can also be done with HTML or markdown in the same repo
This is definitely true and was an option we considered, however colocating hundreds+ posts with code made the repo unnecessarily heavy and slowed our build time drastically. Our content creators also didn't want to use git to edit their content (they would have to learn git / or use the web UI which is a suboptimal editing experience), nor did I want content creators in our repos.
> The fine control seems the be the only real advantage, at the cost of more moving pieces.
Lots of other advantages that I won't outline here, but our data is completely decoupled from our frontend now, so we can do cool stuff like crossposting to different properties via webhook, data cleanup via API (I ran all the blog posts from WP through some remark tools so we have a more standard look and feel), etc... Might not be the right setup for you, but it works really well for us!
The model of deploying a single page app that calls serverless endpoints and cloud databases, has architectural reasons to be preferred. Multi-cloud is a great way to be robust to cloud failures, and have better negotiating leverage with your utility vendor. I wrote a blog post about using Netlify with FaunaDB to build multi-cloud serverless applications here: https://fauna.com/blog/survive-cloud-vendor-crashes-with-net...
There is a static renaissance happening as people realize it doesn't make sense to serve content that rarely changes from a database. Think of the millions of Wordpress blogs that could benefit from the speed, reliability and security of a static frontend. Here is more in-depth argument for static:
I use Netlify for all my static sites and it's been amazing. All I have to do is push and they take care of everything else, I can't understate how much I love the product. If you want to check out a live deployment, my website https://www.stavros.io/ is on Netlify.
I especially like how they provide forms, lambdas and very easy testing by just pushing to another git branch. I don't see why anyone would use Github/Gitlab pages when Netlify exists.
Same. It's made my product design/prototyping/validation workflow insanely efficient. Really happy with it, and curious to explore some of the other features (like lambdas).
I found Netlify a few months ago and use them just for my blog currently. They are great though and would recommend them to anyone. It was trivial to get something setup with https with a Let's Encrypt certificate on my own domain, pushing to GitHub to update the site.
I don't like "+1" type comments, but this is a rare instance where I want to highly recommend Netlify. From support to performance, uptime and UI, they've been exceptional.
I run destinysets.com, a companion site for the video game Destiny 2, and I cannot say how much of a life saver it has been for me. Not only are deploys as simple as a git push, but I also get next-level things like "preview environments" for pull requests _for free_.
The PR preview environments are super important to me because there's a lot of curated data that powers the site, as JSON files in the repo, and I accept user contributions. The Preview environments means I can check what it looks like without having to pull down and run it locally - I even preview, merge and deploy from my phone sometimes. It's amazing.
Hey, I'm a user at destinysets! I really love what you've done with the platform. The experience is a lot faster than some of the other tools out there.
I'm also a very happy Netlify user. Their product seems years ahead of other tools. My favorite thing is that you can now manage DNS and generate SSL for all domains with a single click. Perfect for static sites, SPAs, etc.
I love how Netlify allows you to use the benefits of static site technology (like distributed version control) while allowing for dynamic site functionality like forms. I looked at the documentation for forms https://www.netlify.com/docs/form-handling/#receiving-submis... and it looks very easy.
Yeah, we integrate pretty deeply already. We do have some new flows that could potentially make the story around publishing to Netlify from GitLab cloud seamless from an authentication standpoint, would be happy to brainstorm!
The one thing I've experienced on this front that was clunky was integration between netlify and self-hosted Gitlab. If y'all could come up for a solution for that (which is prettier than "manual" deploy using webhook), I'd love both of your companies even more than I already do.
I just built a test site with Netlify + GitLab. Why must I give it full access to all of my GitLab repositories? I just want to deploy 1 repo. Seems like that opens up unnecessary possibilities for a security breach.
It's the only option with the current OAuth model, however, we only use the token generated in your web browser, and talk directly to GitLab's API from there. We use the token to add a deploy key and a webhook to the specific repository we're linking to, and after that it's discarded. That way there's no long lived token stored on our end that has access to your whole account.
The end result is the same as hosting on S3 + CloudFront, it just saves you a lot of trouble setting things up, makes things just work, gives you nice features like lambdas, A/B testing, forms, authentication, etc etc for free, and just makes your life super easy.
Basically, if you have a repository with your Jekyll (or whatever) site, just add it to Netlify and that's it. It's served, and will automatically update when you push.
Haha... I wasn't on Hacker News then, so I beg your forgiveness :)
That's funny, but as someone who still does not use drop box, NFS shares seem a lot easier to me than setting up drop box. I think I tried drop box once but I found it more onerous to log in than to type mount /mnt/nfs , so.... I guess I'm not the target market (and that's okay!).
Funny enough I went from exactly that to gitlab+netlify setup.
You get loads out of the box, HTTPS being the big one.
In case you didn't get the reference, the other comment was the top comment for dropbox when it announced funding. In theory yes you can still roll your own dropbox, but we all have limited resources and dropbox and netlify make things so much easier that it's worth paying them money to do it right on the first try and not worry about maintenance.
Sure, but GitHub Pages is a relatively “dumb” host. You don’t get preview builds, branch deploys, and lots of other things. It’s nice for a minimal approach but for a large site with lots of people working on it I would not recommend it.
I host my Jekyll blog (zeph.co) on Netlify and can confirm that you can do this.
Netlify connects to GitHub and rebuilds your site automatically when a change is made in the master branch. There's no technical setup – you just connect to your GitHub account with their UI.
I used to use GitHub Pages to host my blog, but Netlify provides more features and it's also free.
Couldn’t agree more. Started with hosting static sites directly on AWS with a combo of S3, CloudFront, Route51, etc. While it worked, Netlify is just so much nicer.
Git push done.
Now I use a combo or netlify plus aws lambda for functionality. Interested to see what they deliver next.
stavros.io is FAST. I'm sure Netlify deserves some credit but much of it belongs to your static approach and the decision not to load the page with 200 JS calls.
Thank you! Yes, I hate slow websites, I have removed as much as I could easily remove, mainly all the social crap. If you look closely, the social buttons are actually static images and links.
It's very simple to configure url rewriting and pre-rendering for SPAs. CxJS website (https://cxjs.io) and documentation is hosted on Netlify and it has been an amazing experience so far. We were on their single user $9 paid plan, but they switched us on the free tier with the pricing change some time ago.
The ability to be able to publish using a simple `git push` and let them do all the work (including assets minification and bundling) is nothing short but amazing. Their dashboard is also really cool. Having the possibility to test a merge request without disrupting the live site, lock a deploy to a specific commit, or see the deployment live. It's simply amazing.
And their customer support is also great. Just yesterday I had a problem with Hugo not compiling my SCSS on their hand and I had two people trying to help me super quickly.
Netlify is a service I can't stop praising because they're just great on all fronts.
It's been a year since I last spoke with Netlify staff [^1]. They weren't super keen on the arguments I raised against using their service given you can host Websites that load in 100-200ms on S3 with CloudFront for pennies a month. If course S3 isn't as push-button as Netlify but it's certainly much more extensible and will probably be around longer.
I've been looking for a service like this and I'm really interested. Too bad the site is choking a bit on extra traffic right now. I'll have to check back later.
Does Netlify support 2FA for paid tiers? Their settings page is really clear about some features being available in certain plans (and btw I love this, it's really clear and it's not very aggressive of an upsell / not obnoxious), but there is no such callout for 2FA.
This is one critical feature that github pages has over Netlify. Github's 2FA is really nice, actually; you can add multiple U2F keys and you can also use TOTP and/or SMS if you want, all at the same time.
I work for netlify. We support 2FA on any tier, since you can auth via git provider and require 2FA there.
We presently don't support REQUIRED 2FA (you can also set a password) under the enterprise account level, since that's what enables SSO using a SAML-based identity provider and enforcing those limits there.
A core part of Netlify's offering (any SaaS's offering really) is some kind of guarantee that attackers can't get in and vandalize users' sites. When you delegate authentication to an identity provider (whether that's through OAuth2/OIDC or SAML), you're delegating that core feature to a third party. You've assuredly gone through the due diligence of asking them how they manage their own security and authentication, but it's still something that you don't control.
Facebook, one of the most valuable public companies in the world, recently reported a breach where they had to reset any "log in with Facebook" authentications for millions of users. Github has roughly two orders of magnitude fewer employees than Facebook.
Anyway in case you have an internal feature request for U2F on "email" logins, please consider this an external "+1" for it.
Netlify is great. I have 5 sites there. All for free. My only concern is that it's too good to be true. I hope nothing changes for the worse (i.e. they get bought and cripple the free tier).
I knew nothing about Netlify before this post, so this is a purely generic, rational note: yes it will. You lure in customers with an attractive free tier and then change it so you can monetize at least some of them and be profitable. Choosing the right business model however, is what I think shows the true character of the company’s leadership. Unfortunately greed usually wins. But enjoy the product while it lasts. Might be a good amount of months, or even years before that happens.
On a sidenote: Please be aware that they didn't start free - I used them before their current pricing tiers and happily paid about about 25 € for their entry- or mid-level tier. Sometime after the new plans kicked in, I realized that I'd loose absolutely nothign by downgrading to the free plan.
It still sounds to good to be true, but I just wanted to point out that they charged for their service when they were much smaller.
Could someone enlighten me how does Netlify differ from Github pages? If I want to put up a static website, what's the advantage of using Netlify over Github pages?
I use Github pages. I'm not a professional web developer so my take is pretty non technical.
The main difference for me seems to be netlify let's you have input forms and do POST requests whereas github pages is more static and only serves static pages via GET.
So much praising so little talk about its limits. I consider myself to be kinda stick in a Rails way of thinking. But most projects I touch heavily depend on a backend, database, or raw computing power.
Everything that doesn't fall in those categories is something I create static (ex nanoc.) i just build out locally push to my git and let a post-commit hook do the Copy pasta. My static Web server runs without attention for 5 plus years now.
I see it makes stuff easier, but i fail to see why it would be so much better than any other git deployment method.
A traditional MVC app process has a start up time and a memory cost so you either have a bad experience while a user waits for it to start up, or you have to rent (or own) some amount of RAM 24/7.
Static site + API Gateway + async processing by a Function-as-a-service type pattern (or its abstracted productified form) allows for something between your two categories here -- mostly content that is pre-rendered but supporting some write-type features where people can still post comments or subscribe to newsletters or something like that.
Chris Coyier is pretty well known in the front end community. He created CSS-Tricks and co-founded CodePen. If anyone can claim to be an expert it's him. But if you're just trying to have a laugh at CSS - well, that's fine too I guess.
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They also have Functions https://www.netlify.com/features/functions/ for dynamic content, but I haven't worked with those, yet.
I think what people are excited about is deploying a JavaScript-based frontend (probably written in React or Vue.js) using Netlify, so the client-side code is quickly distributed and accessible.
Can someone explain how this works exactly? Are they basically offering a way to prebuild apps to static assets and host them on CDNs? How do server-side only things will happen then?
How do you get dynamic? Well, they support a build process so static sites or assets can be built at their end, if that's how you roll. But if you want fully dynamic sites, well, no, you can use their AWS Lambda-powered functions service to help build this out, but you won't be deploying something like a PHP or Rails app to Netlify :-) This limitation opens up a lot of other opportunities to simplify deployment, however.
Then they have myriad other value added features, one of which is cloud functions. You can use that for your server side requirements, or you can use your own server.
It’s not what they do that’s special, it’s how easy/magical they make the process (as well as the very generous free tier).
Yes. Pretty much. They're a more dev friendly CloudFront. Supports deploying from a git repo out-of-the-box, where there's a separate service for this with CloudFront. More expensive than CloudFront, though.
> How do server-side only things will happen then?
This isn't the main problem they're solving. They expect that you'll have an API somewhere to talk to. But they do have a "functions" feature, which is based on AWS Lambda, so you could use that for things that would otherwise fall under server-side. They also have a simple "forms" feature for basic data collection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_delivery_network
You can keep a static site with something like Hugo in a git repo and have Netlify automatically build it and make it available on changes. You can also just toss an HTML and CSS file in (like I do on https://unstuckdev.com/) and their robots put it up.
You can do more with it, and that's what costs money, but it takes a small but tedious hurdle out of putting some HTML on the web.
I've set up a landing page recently and it was flawless on Netlify. You provide a Git repo, connect it to their CI then give some build commands and they will handle the rest.
They still host it on regular servers obviously, but you don't have to do anything to manage it. They have a DNS server which is also pretty neat.
If you're a ruby guy, you can do Jekyll and Middleman for example.
So my toolchain (using middleman) for my company website is:
1. Make change locally
2. Push to Bitbucket
3. Netlify notices the change to the master branch
4. Netlify pulls it to it's container, builds it
5. Newly built files are put in a CDN and HTTPS...all for free
One of my favorite services right now.
EDIT: To give more context this is what I did before:
1. Did the build using middleman to create static assets
2. Uploaded those static assets via FTP to AWS S3
By calling a service from JavaScript. What you're probably getting at is, how do I dynamically generate web pages?
That's different. As a web developer you're probably used to generating the presentation tier on the server at least some of the time. You query a database and spit out some HTML. The so-called "static" approach here means:
1. Generate more stuff up front with build tools that you previously would do at request time. For example, why write server code to generate and cache a blog on every request when you can just build it whenever you write a new blog post?
2. In many cases this greatly narrows down the dynamic stuff that might need to happen. See if you can use JavaScript to fill in the rest. Instead of inserting that ad banner with server code, write a JavaScript function to fetch it from a service (like Lambda) and update the DOM.
3. You can be as dynamic as you want to be by expanding on what you do with JavaScript and services. This is sometimes called writing a single page app. It's maybe more complicated but on the plus side, it's how you write mobile apps and you may be able to share the same backend.
Setting up a few scripts and S3/Cloudfront to do this on your own takes a bit of work. With Netlify you just press the button it seems.
Also how you manage applications and data across different jurisdictions and countries?
https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/
I’ve been using Netlify ever since, though, and have launched 20+ web projects in the past 18 months. Easily my favorite hosting solution I’ve ever used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebase
My biggest concern with Firebase is if it's still going to be around in a year or two. That's why I'd be reluctant to use it for DB and auth stuff. I narrowly avoided jumping into Parse back in the day before that was shuttered so I'm wary.
That's interesting , why Firebase would go away ?
It's just back end on top of GCloud.
Actually , everytime you do something in Firebase , it create a ressources in your GCloud account.
Firebase may not be super popular for SaaS but for Mobile , it's the king and by far , you can use it with no doubt.
FYI to any readers: Firebase Hosting has nothing to do with the other Firebase stuff. In fact, I personally dislike their live database quite a bit.
If you want to host a simple static site with HTTPS, Firebase Hosting really makes it incredibly easy. My only complaint is that they don't let you view access logs. Here's the official response [0] from the Firebase team as to why that's the case.
Once you have to do anything more complex I think it's better to use a different service. If you don't want to host anything yourself I've heard positive things about Zeit [1], although I haven't personally used it.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29669725/can-i-access-w3...
[1] https://zeit.co/
I certainly hope that you don't feel the need to move to something else when your application scales / gets more complex -- our whole mission is to make it so you don't have to. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@mbleigh) if you have specific questions/concerns.
It almost seems too good to be true but as other people have pointed out when its just static content their costs are so low. Since I don't use anything special on their platform, if anything ever happens migrating away should be a breeze too.
Basically, it feels like they would need to make a nice UI and perhaps some connectors for github, etc.
A CDN is equally fast when the content is cached, and if you're building the entire site as static pages then it's not really a dynamic site in the first place and can also be done with HTML or markdown in the same repo.
The fine control seems the be the only real advantage, at the cost of more moving pieces.
The only 2 advantages of splitting this into separate systems is extra customization (even though hosted solutions are already very flexible) and compiling the entire site into static files. The 2nd seems to be more of a thing for devs to enjoy rather than something that makes a real difference to users, especially when you're already using a CDN.
It only accesses the API with a read-only token during the build process.
> it's not really a dynamic site in the first place and can also be done with HTML or markdown in the same repo
This is definitely true and was an option we considered, however colocating hundreds+ posts with code made the repo unnecessarily heavy and slowed our build time drastically. Our content creators also didn't want to use git to edit their content (they would have to learn git / or use the web UI which is a suboptimal editing experience), nor did I want content creators in our repos.
> The fine control seems the be the only real advantage, at the cost of more moving pieces.
Lots of other advantages that I won't outline here, but our data is completely decoupled from our frontend now, so we can do cool stuff like crossposting to different properties via webhook, data cleanup via API (I ran all the blog posts from WP through some remark tools so we have a more standard look and feel), etc... Might not be the right setup for you, but it works really well for us!
https://www.takeshape.io/articles/why-the-best-websites-are-...
Also check out https://jamstack.org/ for more info on tools and techniques for going static.
I especially like how they provide forms, lambdas and very easy testing by just pushing to another git branch. I don't see why anyone would use Github/Gitlab pages when Netlify exists.
I’ve put a few small paying clients on their platform.
I hope they succeed!
The PR preview environments are super important to me because there's a lot of curated data that powers the site, as JSON files in the repo, and I accept user contributions. The Preview environments means I can check what it looks like without having to pull down and run it locally - I even preview, merge and deploy from my phone sometimes. It's amazing.
I'm also a very happy Netlify user. Their product seems years ahead of other tools. My favorite thing is that you can now manage DNS and generate SSL for all domains with a single click. Perfect for static sites, SPAs, etc.
I can see how people would use Netlify over GitLab. By the way, in GitLab we allow you to test a branch with a review app. In fact for 11.5 we're planning to show you a direct link to the page that changes https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/33418 and someone contributed the option to make the static site that is generate with pages private https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/33422
Maybe a JAMS template?
Basically, if you have a repository with your Jekyll (or whatever) site, just add it to Netlify and that's it. It's served, and will automatically update when you push.
I think the commenter is referring to this infamous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
That's funny, but as someone who still does not use drop box, NFS shares seem a lot easier to me than setting up drop box. I think I tried drop box once but I found it more onerous to log in than to type mount /mnt/nfs , so.... I guess I'm not the target market (and that's okay!).
This is critical for me since I edit using my Android Jekyll-optimized tool Teddy Hyde (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.EditorHyde...).
Netlify connects to GitHub and rebuilds your site automatically when a change is made in the master branch. There's no technical setup – you just connect to your GitHub account with their UI.
I used to use GitHub Pages to host my blog, but Netlify provides more features and it's also free.
Netlify is one of those few products that feels like it Just Works(TM) which is rare to find!
Git push done.
Now I use a combo or netlify plus aws lambda for functionality. Interested to see what they deliver next.
stavros.io is FAST. I'm sure Netlify deserves some credit but much of it belongs to your static approach and the decision not to load the page with 200 JS calls.
The ability to be able to publish using a simple `git push` and let them do all the work (including assets minification and bundling) is nothing short but amazing. Their dashboard is also really cool. Having the possibility to test a merge request without disrupting the live site, lock a deploy to a specific commit, or see the deployment live. It's simply amazing.
And their customer support is also great. Just yesterday I had a problem with Hugo not compiling my SCSS on their hand and I had two people trying to help me super quickly.
Netlify is a service I can't stop praising because they're just great on all fronts.
[^1]: https://habd.as/zero-to-http-2-aws-hugo/
This is one critical feature that github pages has over Netlify. Github's 2FA is really nice, actually; you can add multiple U2F keys and you can also use TOTP and/or SMS if you want, all at the same time.
We presently don't support REQUIRED 2FA (you can also set a password) under the enterprise account level, since that's what enables SSO using a SAML-based identity provider and enforcing those limits there.
A core part of Netlify's offering (any SaaS's offering really) is some kind of guarantee that attackers can't get in and vandalize users' sites. When you delegate authentication to an identity provider (whether that's through OAuth2/OIDC or SAML), you're delegating that core feature to a third party. You've assuredly gone through the due diligence of asking them how they manage their own security and authentication, but it's still something that you don't control.
Facebook, one of the most valuable public companies in the world, recently reported a breach where they had to reset any "log in with Facebook" authentications for millions of users. Github has roughly two orders of magnitude fewer employees than Facebook.
Anyway in case you have an internal feature request for U2F on "email" logins, please consider this an external "+1" for it.
It still sounds to good to be true, but I just wanted to point out that they charged for their service when they were much smaller.
The main difference for me seems to be netlify let's you have input forms and do POST requests whereas github pages is more static and only serves static pages via GET.
Everything that doesn't fall in those categories is something I create static (ex nanoc.) i just build out locally push to my git and let a post-commit hook do the Copy pasta. My static Web server runs without attention for 5 plus years now.
I see it makes stuff easier, but i fail to see why it would be so much better than any other git deployment method.
Static site + API Gateway + async processing by a Function-as-a-service type pattern (or its abstracted productified form) allows for something between your two categories here -- mostly content that is pre-rendered but supporting some write-type features where people can still post comments or subscribe to newsletters or something like that.
- the "static webserver"
- the sandbox for commit hooks
- instant CDN & cache-busting
- 1-click domain setup
- 1-click SSL setup
- git-branch powered a/b testing
- git-branch powered deploy previews
- Functions-as-a-service deployment and routing
and that's the free tier
are you kidding me?
Now the question is do I need a cdn to host my blog made of static files? No. But I will take it if it is free.
We're running Standups.io frontend ReactJS app with them, and for $0 / mo, which sounds nuts. Sometimes I wish they'd even charge us.