[madeofpalk]

> But you get free static sites through GitHub

GitHub doesn't support a build process, right? So you would have to do that yourself and commit that.

> nearly free static sites on Amazon S3

You'll have to manage the build and deploy here yourself then.

Netlify is great because its easy, and free (if you're under their bandwidth cap). They have really cool features like automatically deploying a preview environment for pull requests, or a/b testing different branches.

I run an open source video game companion site DestinySets.com where I have a lot of data in JSON files in my repo. Github + Netlify means I can take PRs for changes to the data, sometimes from non-programmers (or beginners), preview, merge and deploy from my phone, all for free (both money and time) Its pretty easy.

[sytse]

GitLab does support free static websites and a build process, see https://about.gitlab.com/product/pages/

[JetSpiegel]

It also integrates with Netlify now.

[brianpgordon]

> GitHub doesn't support a build process, right? So you would have to do that yourself and commit that.

GitHub builds your site with Jekyll.

[madeofpalk]

I don't use Jekyll.

[tkjef]

for Amazon S3 i setup the s3, cloudfront & cert manually (should put it in terraform, but it takes just a second). here's a nice article to walk you through that (says it's for hugo, but you could use it for any ssg): https://agop.me/post/https-enabled-portfolio-hugo-s3-cloudfr...

then i build and deploy with a bash tool i made called NanoCD: https://github.com/tkjef/NanoCD

has lots of helpful options. easy to wrap your head around. easy to add whatever workflows,tests you'd like.

[dvasdekis]

The point is not that one can/can't do it elsewhere, but Netlify makes it easy. You are less likely to run into that one frustrating problem that takes you hours to solve (like writing a build and deploy tool in bash) - Netlify does it for you.

I've done a static site from Terraform, and I've done it more recently in Netlify - Terraform was exponentially harder, end to end.

[madeofpalk]

or use netlify.

the whole point is that I don't want to futz around and use terraform, or read a tutorial, or build a bash tool or whatever.

It's literally like 3 clicks in Netlify and it'll handle _everything_ for me. I point my DNS to Netlify and then I've got HTTPS for free as well.

I used to deploy to S3 as well, and I had a small little `yarn deploy` script that did the webpack build and upload to S3 - its not that hard https://github.com/joshhunt/destinySets/blob/ae08807e3d23de9.... But Netlify is so much easier, especially when working from multiple machines.