[hashtagMERKY]

For static sites I used to use surge [0], but now I use Neltify [1] for my site [2], because it offers free SSL on your own domain, and continuous deployment from a GitHub or Gitlab repository. You can set your own build options, for example to build Jekyll.

(I have no affiliation with Netlify I just think their service is neat.)

[0] https://surge.sh/

[1] https://www.netlify.com/

[2] https://gilly.tk

edit: formatting

[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.

[StavrosK]

I wanted to migrate to Netlify (I'm currently very happy with Gitlab pages), but I don't want to have to install all of node just to use their utility. What's wrong with static binaries, or at least Python?

[_fool]

I work for Netlify.

You don't have to use any of our clients to deploy a site; they're just options in case you'd rather build the site yourself than have us build it. I rarely use the clients (we have one in go in addition to the Node.js version: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-go and further our API is scriptable in any language and fully documented here: https://open-api.netlify.com/)

You can (and we do this for you by default) configure GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket to trigger a build whenever you do something at the repo. The default, free behavior builds on pushes or PR's against your selected branch and if it's a PR, shows you a deploy preview rather than publishing at your main URL: https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/20/introducing-deploy-p...).

Finally you can drag and drop a zipfile with your site's built contents, if you are in a hurry or less technically inclined.

So, you don't need Node to use us and I don't think most of our customers do use that client; most build direct from their repositories.

[StavrosK]

Thank you, I'm one of those impossible customers who goes "oh I want a free tier, and oh, I don't like node, and oh, I don't want to give you access to my Gitlab", but it's great that you have a Go version of the client. I think I'm going to switch everything to you, I've been wanting to for a while!

[_fool]

awesome to hear! I'm the guy you'll talk to if you have a support question, so I hope to not hear from you soon (since that would mean that everything worked as expected :))

[StavrosK]

I'm sorry you had to hear from me, but I recant! Netlify is, indeed, fantastic. It took five minutes to move my site over, and fifteen minutes to waste Chris' time with questions.

I'm amazed at how fast the site is now: https://portfolio.stavros.io/

[_fool]

oops, I linked our Go library not our go client. You'll want https://github.com/netlify/netlifyctl for the client!