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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Not seeing any bandwidth, storage or other costs so I wonder what their soft/hard limits are for those things. I see their forms have really low limits for the price 1000 submissions and 1GB file upload limits, 2m functions on the $45 plan [1].
One of the things I love about Netlify is that I have never asked my clients to flush their cache after updating their sites... everything is invalidated and refreshed almost by magic. I suddenly realised this after months of using it, sometimes multiple pushes to live each day and it never skipped a beat, no issues with clients getting edgy because their site hasn’t been updated or because something doesn’t look right (css not refreshed but html has) etc.
Built vote by mail website for Florida (https://www.stampthevote.com) using a single JSON file with 1500 zip codes and Gatsby.js and deployed with Netlify.
Great to be in the future and not have to worry about hosting a server for such a simple site.
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.
I've been tinkering with Netlify for a year or two now and have two production sites on it for the last ~6 months, and it's amazing. If you have a site built with Vue/React/Angular, there really is no reason to not use Netlify! I've even been playing around with some API endpoints using Netlify Functions (which is AWS Lambda) and it's pretty neat, you can develop the front end and back end in the same repo and have it all automagically deploy with a git push.
How is an "Application Delivery Network" different from a CDN (which AFAIK is what Netlify currently is)? Netlify still only handles static content, right?
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.
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.
I don't quite get this. I'm a long time Heroku user and this seems to be much more limited and not much better in any dimension, why is this so popular?
This is an honest question, I just don't quite get why there's so much excitement in the comments.
I have a few popular HN-launched static sites on Netlify including https://servicelist.io/. Not only do they provide a seamless hosting and CDN (cache-expiring) experience but they also have a wonderful multi-user CMS that eliminates about half of my Rails sites!
I'll reiterate a few other sentiments in this thread, it feels a bit too good to be true. Even with 300k monthly traffic, not paying a dime seems like a precarious situation to be in for a free service.
I'm in love with Netlify. The product is spot on. The support team is fast and knowledgeable. Things are simple and they just work, and it doesn't feel like it's holding you back.
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.
[+] [-] StavrosK|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] madeofpalk|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sytse|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] everdev|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpye|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mstijak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xrd|7 years ago|reply
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...).
[+] [-] tootie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fbnlsr|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spondyl|7 years ago|reply
Netlify is one of those few products that feels like it Just Works(TM) which is rare to find!
[+] [-] virgil_disgr4ce|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RileyJames|7 years ago|reply
Git push done.
Now I use a combo or netlify plus aws lambda for functionality. Interested to see what they deliver next.
[+] [-] L_Rahman|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] godzillabrennus|7 years ago|reply
I’ve put a few small paying clients on their platform.
I hope they succeed!
[+] [-] gigatexal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixelmonkey|7 years ago|reply
https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/
[+] [-] mbleigh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianfryer|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] perplamps|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|7 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] avip|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebase
[+] [-] sergiotapia|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herbst|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blairanderson|7 years ago|reply
- 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
[+] [-] lotyrin|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chrstphrknwtn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jypepin|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] tiborsaas|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] petercooper|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abalone|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unstuckdev|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] drawkbox|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.netlify.com/pricing/
[+] [-] tima101|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjsweet|7 years ago|reply
It just works. Every time.
[+] [-] panda427|7 years ago|reply
Great to be in the future and not have to worry about hosting a server for such a simple site.
[+] [-] learc83|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorbypark|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ballsyballsman|7 years ago|reply
Also how you manage applications and data across different jurisdictions and countries?
[+] [-] hamandcheese|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ajedi32|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkrecny|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] securityfreak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desireco42|7 years ago|reply
They make my life easy.
[+] [-] matt2000|7 years ago|reply
This is an honest question, I just don't quite get why there's so much excitement in the comments.
Thanks!
[+] [-] moeamaya|7 years ago|reply
I'll reiterate a few other sentiments in this thread, it feels a bit too good to be true. Even with 300k monthly traffic, not paying a dime seems like a precarious situation to be in for a free service.
[+] [-] danr4|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhabdas|7 years ago|reply
[^1]: https://habd.as/zero-to-http-2-aws-hugo/
[+] [-] JBiserkov|7 years ago|reply