[echelon]

Netlify did this to me too!

I have my startup with them and pay them a hefty bill. I had my personal websites on a second account (that should have been a free plan - one deploy every three years, next to zero traffic), and they deleted them and continue to bill me.

I've had multiple customer service interactions asking them to stop billing me and they're nothing short of rude and unhelpful. "We've told you the dozens of steps to take to get us to stop billing you" kind of responses from their top CS head. (Paraphrasing that quote, though I'm sure "we told you" is verbatim).

I think I tripped their janky system up when I started scaling one of my personal projects into a startup. I converted my personal account into my business account and moved my personal websites into a new account. This totally botched their system. The thing that gets me is how unhelpful they've been in dealing with the matter. It's not like any of this is my fault.

As soon as I get bandwidth to take my startup elsewhere, I'm gone and I'm never looking back. It's amateur hour over at Netlify. They're downright unpleasant to deal with.

I'm warning everyone I know to avoid them.

[lloydatkinson]

I have been mulling over switching from Netlify to Vercel for a while for my personal site too.

Netlify has weird defaults for everything. It caches almost nothing by default. I had to create a Netlify headers file to tell them that actually yes I would like my CSS, JS, and fonts cached.

Absolutely absurd I had to do that. Even for font files. Because as we all know, the font files change so often that we should never cache them /s

All manner of dumb things like this. Really the only thing keeping me on Netlify is that it has for handling built in. That and fear of changing DNS settings (I use Google domains).

[oefrha]

Careful now, if you use Netlify’s _headers to do caching the obvious way, every time you push a new build, some of your users may get a broken site that can only be unfucked by clearing cache. I happened to have written about this problem a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508640

[tough]

OK so move to vercel and just dont use Netlify fam

[tannhaeuser]

> fear of changing DNS settings

Is that really a thing, with HNers of all people? You just use your registrar's/nameserver operator's web tool to point your DNS name to a new IP. Transferring your DNS to a new registrar might be a bit more involved but is guaranteed to be also possible by domain market regulation. Or maybe it is a problem of cache invalidation and/or lack of control over exact timing of DNS switchover? Or, idk, possibly Google-owned TLDs like .dev require Google Domains as registrar? Or does Google Domains (or GoDaddy or other big registrar) make transferring your domain difficult in a dark pattern way? Doubt it though, if even changing pointed to IPs appears difficult, which however shouldn't be something a registrar would have an interest in making difficult.

[echelon]

> Is that really a thing, with HNers of all people?

You want it to be hitless. Unfortunately DNS can take days to fully propagate and you may not see mistakes until it's too late to fix them. This can cause horrifying outages.

HNers should be respectful of DNS changes and plan accordingly.

[neurostimulant]

I always setup a reverse proxy on the old server that tunnel all TCP traffics on port 80 and 443 to the new server whenever I migrated a website for this reason. Some network really take their time updating their DNS cache, even if your domain has low TTL.

[zakki]

You can change your DNS TTL to let say 5 minutes before you move to new IP. You can change it 3 days before the movement(?).

[scott_w]

A story from 10 years ago providing services to the education sector:

I did exactly what you suggested, even leaving extra time (a full weekend!) for the DNS changes to propagate. What happened?

Turns out local authorities don't all respect DNS TTL settings and we had a major outage. I had to on-the-fly learn how to configure iptables to act as a proxy for the new server.

The "proxy" was still receiving requests 2 weeks later.

[chillfox]

Fewer and fewer places actually respect DNS TTL.

[lloydatkinson]

Indeed, not sure what the anger in their comment was for.

[lloydatkinson]

Given that Netlify has very specific and unusual steps to setup in the first place, yes, it is a concern.

[cpursley]

Render.com is a great replacement for both Netlify and Heroku. Check it out, static sites are even free.

[echelon]

> It caches almost nothing by default.

Now I have to go check and see if it's not caching our fonts. Geez, I just assumed...

> fear of changing DNS settings

I recently had to migrate DNS to Cloudflare to stop a 40,000 QPS DDoS attack. DNS migration was slow, but painless. As long as you plan accordingly and set up the new destination in advance, it should be fine. Hosting DNS at a DNS provider will give you extra flexibility in the future.

[lloydatkinson]

Yeah, it's absurd. Every page load the fonts were sent again.

I use google domains for dns too, just with netlify as the host.

[iJohnDoe]

I’ve always thought positively about Netlify. About to launch my startup there as well.

I was thinking about using their identity and access plug-in to build out member access only pages. Would Render have this capability? Or any other non-code recommendations?