[ekiara]

netlify looks great, and the free tier covers probably 90% of what all SMEs need. I'm curious, where are the sites actually hosted?

Does netlify provide the actual hosting or they allow you to setup deployment to a VPS? Also if netlify does the hosting, how good is their uptime/availability?

[_fool]

I work for Netlify.

We host the sites on our CDN, which has more than a dozen points of presence around the world. You can either let us build your site using anything you can get working on linux (see https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/10/18/how-our-build-bots-b... for details) or build it yourself and ship the finished product to us. Nothing "runs" on our side after build, so there are no servers/VPS's which you can configure in the equation as far as hosting is concerned. We let you do a few things that you used to do with htaccess files (redirects are free; custom headers including basic auth are a paid feature)

You can check out our list of past incidents on our status page to gauge uptime for yourself: http://netlifystatus.com/

Since we use redundant DNS (NS1 + self-hosted), and use dynamic DNS response based on both location the query comes from cross product which CDN nodes are responding, we can (and occasionally do) remove, rebuild, or add CDN nodes without affecting our overall service. Since we use multiple network providers (for instance we use AWS, but we also use 3 other services), downtime at any one of our providers won't introduce any substantial problems in our network.

[kaishiro]

+1 for Netlify. Have a dozen or so production sites there currently and am a happy customer.