Pretty cool. We were recently discussing how a service like this could exist. Excited to try it out.
One suggestion - on the Signup page, you ask for a lot of permissions right away from Github. I think it would be better if you just collected profile/email address and then when I started exploring a little more and working to get my first site deployed, only then ask for the additional permissions.
Signup permissions is definitely something we need to work on more. We optimized them at the beginning to give people the best experience possible, but we'll definitely iterate to allow using Netlify with less permissions. We just need to find the right workflow to still keep it as simple and powerful as possible.
Just to follow up. I have a hugo site that has a pretty custom directory layout. I managed to sign up and get it provisioned with letsencrypt already. Definitely cool.
These are some things that you can do with our Pages tier FREE, that you cannot do with GH Pages:
- We don't restrict people to only one static site generator, like Jekyll. You have use whatever with our Continuous Deployment.
- Automatic rollbacks at the CDN level. If you push a broken site, you don't need to stress about fixing the issue, pushing again, and waiting until the changes are published again. We have a big button that says "Rollback". Clicking that, our CDN automatically purges your site and promotes the good version you want. After that, you can spend as much time as you want writing a proper fix.
- Automatic provisioning and renewals of Let's Encrypt certificates for custom domains. If you have a custom domain, we do that for you, you don't have to worry about anything.
- Free custom domains, you have to have a paid subscription with GitHub if you want to use your own domain.
As I said again, those things are FREE with our initial plan, $0.
Edit: I know the parent comments are comparing to Github. I thought that it would be useful to let people know about Gitlab's offering.
It appears Gitlab provides support for custom domains on their hosted Gitlab solution as well as support for different site generators via their Gitlab CI solution. It is probably not as easy to use as Netlify though.
I love Gitlab and use it for all my projects, I should try their Pages at some point (although I don't use GH pages either, it was just the offering I was more familiar with from hearing about it).
EDIT: Just tried it, I can't believe how easy it was. Literally just add a CI task that outputs a "pages" artifact.
I see, thank you for your answers! To be honest, I don't think it's worth the price for me when I can get a server for $5 and push as many sites as I want, but a friend of mine loves you, so you must be doing something right!
Also, as other commented have said, you don't need a paid account to publish with GitHub pages, and it doesn't restrict you to one generator either, it will happily publish whatever HTML.
Impressive features. I think there is room for multiple static site solutions and there is a lot more to do. Sites likes https://www.penflip.com/ are also based on git but make it easier to use, something I'm sure Netlify is also looking at.
Netlify founder here. Firebase hosting is great for simple static content that you push manually.
We do continuous deployment with deep git integration that'll create unique preview URLs for each pull request, making it awesome to collaborate on single page apps or content driven websites.
In general you'll find a very deep feature set that's making it possible to take this approach to building sites all the way from simple prototypes to running, maintaining and serving huge projects.
Zeit is an awesome product that I use as well for my node APIs in tandem with my Static stuff on Netlify. I wish the deploy limits were a bit higher in the free plan, 20 is so low :(
At first I didn't understand the difference between Netlify vs. Jekyll / Hugo + s3_website [1] + S3/CloudFront + git. Admittedly, (1) the OP does a terrible job differentiating the two, and (2) there's significant overlap. Netlify is built for "dynamic" static websites, or rather JavaScript applications (whether they be single-page or not, it doesn't matter). It serves up a static page, and the JS and APIs do the rest.
So, for anyone who wants a basic breakdown between Netlify's features, and Jekyll + s3_website + S3/CloudFront + git/GitHub, here's the list of things BOTH support:
- Redirects / Reverse Proxying (s3_website helps here with x-amz-redirect-location header [3])
- Headers / Custom Headers / Basic Auth
- Versioning and Rollbacks (handled with git)
Here's the list of things ONLY Netlify supports:
- GeoIP / language-based redirects (on their Enterprise Plan for $1,000/month)
- Form submissions [4]
- Analytics snippet injection [5] (albeit a little unnecessary for most developers)
- Atomic deploys [6]
- Prerending [7] (one of the most important and useful features)
Please, correct anything that's wrong.
Netlify's killer feature, for me, looks like prerending: rendering JS pages with a headless browser to help with SEO, with no work on the developer's end, is awesome! However, Netlify strikes me as far too expensive at $9/$49/$399/$1k per month. Especially with developers as their target market. That's too much for what little extra features it does offer.
Here's to hoping they can continue to differentiate themselves more.
You're completely forgetting Continuous deployment in your comparison, which is a pretty big part of the modern static workflow. This includes things like pushing branches to different URLs, having a way to previewing pull requests, caching dependencies between runs, etc, etc... It's a huge part of our service.
Apart from that, if you ever work with static publishing and a CDN, and actually tried making the CDN cache your HTML assets, you'll instantly run into problems with instant cache invalidation and atomic deploys. You'll never run into these issues with netlify.
Rollbacks are possible with git, but previewing any version you've any deployed at any time are not something you can do.
Even basic things, like getting both your naked domain and the wwww domain to work correctly will often take developer time on that platform (how much do you bill your time at? Hopefully more than $49/month).
As for cost - our free plan is super generous and cover pretty much every thing you'll get with the alternative setup you mention. And for personal projects or open source projects we even give away our Pro plan for free!
The people that pay for our plans are typically not developers but their clients or employers who care about the best performance, highest uptime, and fastest speed of development.
Appreciate you taking the time to respond. It seems like you're targeting two different markets (developers & their clients/employers), and having to construct two different product stories. Of course, what appeals to the developer market doesn't necessarily appeal to their client/employers and vice versa.
I'm speaking as a freelance developer that's firmly in your target market, charging well in excess of $49/month, and delivering three static websites in the past month for clients, one being the University of Leiden. I understand very well what you're trying to solve, and pointed out the places where your product is superior.
Right now, it feels like your product is heavily slanted towards developers. And it feels like that's who you're asking to pay for the service. My clients couldn't careless about API proxying, deeper Git integration, or auto-building any branch to unique deploy URLs, even if that makes sense to me as a developer. They're not going to be working with those things. They wouldn't accept me saddling a $49/month charge upon them AFTER I've delivered the project and all they want to do is run a one-off script to deploy the website for minor updates to content over the next 3-5 years.
What I'm saying is, yes, Netlify makes it easier and eliminates servers for pre-rendering and form submissions. That fits the SaaS model. But I think you're missing out on another part of the market: the people willing to pay a one-off license per site for your deployment software, i.e., setup S3/CloudFront, SSL with Let's Encrypt, domain handling, a nice deployment pre-processing pipeline, preview past versions locally in browser, etc. in an automated fashion and then allow them to push updates with one command. That's what my clients want, and that's what I deliver to them. They'd be willing to pay $49, once, for that script (folded into their invoice).
If you don't need the features on the $49 dollar plan - why not just set them up with the free plan or the basic plan?
The people that pay for the $49/$349 or $1000 are typically clients with projects that are not simple "static sites". Typically these sites includes content management and requires a build to run everytime and editor triggers a change. They're often .com's for companies that always ends up needing proxying because they have legacy apps behind different URL
Other clients have in-house dev teams and run their main web application on Netlify with constant updates in different branches and pull requests, and Netlify lets them collabarote across these.
Again others just have large global presences and care about having someone to escalate to if there's a problem with a launch, any uptime, certificate, configuration issue or the like.
Those are the one that needs and use our Pro/Global/Enterprise tiers.
One suggestion - on the Signup page, you ask for a lot of permissions right away from Github. I think it would be better if you just collected profile/email address and then when I started exploring a little more and working to get my first site deployed, only then ask for the additional permissions.