I deploy my React apps and landing pages there and don't need to worry about the underlying compute, or load balancing, or anything else. Thankfully I didn't do any frontend work before Netlify was available!
I don't really get all the hype around the Jamstack (https://jamstack.org/), though.
Netlify's hypothesis seems to be that if you deploy websites on CDNs, instead of on web servers, then you'll get better performance.
Also, because it's just a static site, there's no backend or database, so you get better security.
I accept this hypothesis, but it seems like you still need a backend. Netlify is promoting functions as a service [1] so you can avoid having web servers for the backend too, but I'm a little skeptical you get the flexibility to build applications with dependencies or non-trivial business logic or design with this approach.
If anyone's tried a FaaS and this is incorrect, please describe your experience!
Their functions are also limited to triggers relating only to Netlify events: https://docs.netlify.com/functions/trigger-on-events/#availa...
to be clear the functions are also exposed to the public internet as http endpoints so you can ping them from anywhere else, including, for example, your frontend app, or Zapier [1], or GitHub Actions or cron service of your choice
(i work at netlify)
1: https://www.netlify.com/blog/2018/11/07/automate-your-netlif...
They did a very good job at marketing "HTML5 hosting"
That sounds awful. How do you share any of your common logic? Do you have to write versions of your important routines once in each language, each with its own set of quirks and bugs?
It's bad enough in microservice land, where every time you want any shared code you have to extract it to a e.g. "utils" library and massage the versioning to get it in to the right apps.
End result: most people don't and you end up with many different little versions of your routines that do important things.
Of course. It's just managed by someone else and you often are paying per usage. And you'll find yourself needing to wrangle numerous serverless platforms to actually build out relevant business logic if you want to do something meaningful, one third-party microservice at a time.
> Also, because it's just a static site, there's no backend or database, so you get better security.
It's not as trendy to think of it this way, but "static sites" are just caches with manual invalidation.
I'll give you an example - My client has a high traffic website with over 300TB of bandwidth which is being served via cloudflare on a $20/mo plan (probably free plan also works well I guess).
Migrating this to Netlify would cost us roughly $6000 per month. (Netlify charges $20/1000GB). To me that's insane if you really want to adopt JAMstack.
For 6 grand, I can host an elaborate GCP setup with load balancers on compute engine. Or I can have a dozen instances on AppEngine all automatically handling my load for me. What am I missing?
This is not to say I don't like static sites - it's a different thing. I am 100% proponent of static sites, maybe just not Netlify.
You just add the domain to the site in Netlify, but then set up the hosts as CNAME in cf pointing at the codenamed Netlify hostname for the site.
I’m on the cf free plan, and the whole setup works great.
Cloudflare could probably take the whole stack though if they gave me a simple tool to upload a directory of files to them.
(I stopped using Netlify for builds when I started moving my repos off of GitHub due to GitHub’s collaboration with ICE, and Netlify only supports the major git services for autobuilds. I self-host my repos with Gitea now, so I have to build on my Drone server and just use the Netlify CLI in the last CI step to upload the built site.)
Though, as a word of caution, they have a limit of 30 sites at the moment, which cannot be lifted unless you are on an enterprise account. So, YMMV.
For a single static site, it's ridiculously easy to use though.
I run a SaaS on Google Cloud functions and the bandwidth cost from somebody linking our homepage in a HN comment is often 2x the cost to run the actual service.
FYI Netlify doesn't work well with Cloudflare. That's the reason why it's so expensive as a standalone option.
https://community.netlify.com/t/how-do-i-use-cloudflare-dns-...
Never understood this. Is there an example of a company that took funding "just in case" and it was worth it?
I love Netlify (my business currently depends on it), but I'm getting the idea they are feeling the pressure of "We got something big we have to make it as big as possible", which is not inherently bad but in Netlify's case could easily take the product in the wrong way.
Their focus on enterprises especially worries me, as their current feature set works amazingly for "indie hackers" and small businesses.
There isn't really an advantage. It is static page hosting. I remember the days when you would just FTP those sites onto a server, serve with Apache and call it a day, but I guess everything needs to be behind a CDN these days.
Netlify abstracts all these things for you, also it stores all the versions you have uploaded or built and gives a quick option to rollback to the specific version.
I'm kind of AWS power user and have no problem with with corresponding terraform templates for S3 hosting, but I prefer Netlify if possible.
But I did it on the free plan.
I’m quite unsure where the valuation comes from.
SaaS valuations have reached all time highs companies doing $2MM ARR are raising at $100MM+ post
I've recently started at my first enterprise contract (10+ years into my career) in the cloud team (as a front-end engineer building the interface to a cloud console) and am amazed at the level of resources poured into infrastructure and devops.
I'm obviously new to enterprise - and there are probably reasons I'm not aware of that prevent them from going all in on things like static site hosts and managed infrastructure - but I do feel that there's a lot of room for enterprise to shift in this direction.
So it helps to have in house infrastructure teams that can somewhat consolidate and invest in long term planning and architecture for computer systems and services required by these enterprises.
A bit like Heroku also.
And just like with Heroku, you get the nice free offering and the second you out-grow that, costs explode like crazy (and leave you wishing you'd just rolled your own anyway).
For example, you have to pay $19/month/site for 1,000 form submissions on Netlify.
Say it with me: PER site, $19/month, 1,000 form submissions. I am not sure how they can possibly justify charging that much.
Netlify's core USP appears to be making the process of deploying and operating a static site easier - auto-deploys from GitHub in build process, HTTPS cert management, simple CDN config etc.
Claimed 'performance' gains come from static hosting closer to visitors but AFAIK their CDN runs on AWS, and relies on nginx which means HTTP/2 prioritisation is broken - they've got a lot of work to catch up with Akamai, Fastly or Cloudflare on this front.
The whole JAMStack approach seems to result in companies re-inventing the wheel in non-performant ways - Contentful CMS delivers sites via Netlify but all the content is requested as JSON which JS components then render to the page.
Taking away the deploy pain is definitely a win for many of use but it's something I could imagine Cloudflare launching, which coupled with their other features - image optimisation, edge workers etc could probably blow Netlify out of the water
- Netlify is multi-cloud: https://www.netlify.com/products/edge/
- Content from a headless CMS like Contentful is generally retrieved at build time, not rendered in the browser
Suggest you look at at few more Contentful sites in DevTools the Contentful site itself has no content in it's HTML and requests all content as JSON which is then rendered via JS components.
The content is in all the page-data.json responses in this waterfall - https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200307_EQ_e60b0b3388b452b...
[1] https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/
A bit of economics:
The free plan offers 300 minutes of build and 100 GB of bandwidth. To compare, AWS S3 offers 20,000 GET requests for free. Given my pages average about 1 megabyte (other stuff is served from third-party CDNs, which are free). Thus 1 GB of bandwidth is approximately 1000 page views. In other words, Netlify offers about 5X as many free page views per month as AWS. I'm under absolutely no danger of getting to 100K page views, in a good month I get a couple of thousand. However, let's assume that I start writing better content and more people read it, like more than 100,000 page views per month. In that case, Netlify overage costs 20 cents per GB, AWS costs 9 cents. Overall, "at scale" Netlify is about twice as expensive as AWS S3 for static sites, but it's better at modest scale.
You can do similar stuff on AWS, like host a create-react-app but the aws ux is terrible.
I paid for the per-site analytics for a few months, the server side analytics means it captures much more of the traffic than client-side GA style, but the metrics available were just too basic for any real commercial use.
GitHub can roll out something like this very easily. They already have GitHub actions and GitHub pages. Netlify’s core proposition is when you commit to a branch, a build command is run that outputs assets to a directory. Netlify will put those assets in a cdn. You can route your custom domain and they’ll provision the letsencrypt very for you and you have a https site. Boom!
They have other value adds like forms which seem quite overpriced. That’s when you need a db.
Overall my experience is that it’s good to get something out of the door but you prolly will need to move to a cloud provider if you need full control like caching headers and any form of backend.
Basically as a dev all I want is something simple. Here’s my script that builds the frontend. Here’s the docker files for various services. Here’s my requirements for a database. Lastly here’s my routing rules of urls to different docker services and how to scale them. Go host it and give me a good log analyzer so I can monitor how things are operating.
Render.com has nice things but there’s definitely value in simplifying most webapps deployments and still making the whole thing dirt cheap to operate.
I currently pay $18 for analytics for my podcast page (https://kompilator.se) and my agency's page (https://yoisho.se), just to pay _something_, but the quality of the "analytics" is unfortunately extremely sub-par compare to the rest of their service.
