[mitch-snipline]

I got quite excited at being able to stick my static sites on DO for free, but notice on this page[1] that only the first three are free, then it's $3/m/site.

Perhaps I've been spoiled by services like Netlify. I'd be interested to know what the benefits are of using DO's service over free alternatives.

[1] https://cloud.digitalocean.com/apps?i=6bf7f8

[sergeykish]

Netlify Analytics $9/month per site [1], no way to download logs [2]. That said it is easy to deploy, free HTTPS [3] and they support MIME definitions in _headers [4].

I host on Google Cloud Storage, it is not that easy but not that hard either [5], GoAccess for web analytics, no HTTPS. I would be interesting to have a matrix of supported features on different platforms. And how deployment compares to Nginx, letsencrypt, git.

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

[2] https://community.netlify.com/t/download-raw-server-access-l...

[3] https://docs.netlify.com/domains-https/https-ssl/

[4] https://docs.netlify.com/routing/headers/#syntax-for-the-hea...

[5] http://sergeykish.com/google-cloud-storage-static-hosting

[mitch-snipline]

The logs would be useful, but there are alternate options that could be used over Netlify's $9/m option. For personal/side projects that price is a no go for me.

I've used GCS before and I agree it's not easy/hard, but certainly not as simple as Netlify.

> I would be interesting to have a matrix of supported features on different platforms. And how deployment compares to Nginx, letsencrypt, git.

That would be useful, especially now that there are more and more options out there. I've seen benchmark comparisons but features would be more useful in my opinion, unless the speed is really poor.

[phildougherty]

Thanks, that is valuable feedback. We definitely recognize that there are other options out there that offer unlimited static sites. We feel that the additional features and capabilities offered by the platform including running scaled our dynamic workloads, workers, jobs, and databases - at a price point that is very competitive will provide you with value to make up for it - having these features just results in a different economic model for us.

[withinboredom]

It seems rather silly to limit the number of free sites unless you somehow restrict the number of accounts people can open. Also, by restricting, you lose the analytics to see how people are using the service when, not if, people start creating multiple accounts.

[GordonS]

Someone already mentioned GitHub Pages. I'm pretty sure Azure supports serving static sites straight from Blob Storage too - put Cloudflare in front, and you should be able to host dozens of static sites for a few pennies a month.

[SahAssar]

Why not just use github pages for static sites?

[mitch-snipline]

I might do in the future. To be honest, Github Pages has not been on my radar until I saw the recent article posted here with benchmarks across popular static site hosts.

I'll have to look at the benefits of that over Netlify, too.