[shiftpgdn]

https://www.netlify.com/pricing/#pricing-table-full-feature-...

Almost every feature you charge for is something you can achieve for free inside of a basic VPS. I understand you have the classic SV "Hotel California" model where you can check in but you can never leave. But frankly this makes the internet worse in every way possible and part of the point of the original article.

[doctor_eval]

I gotta say, this comment really comes across as being written by someone who has quite literally never tried Netlify, or doesn’t understand the value prop at all.

Seriously, it is orders of magnitude faster to deploy a static website on Netlify - simply drag and drop a folder from desktop - than it is to spin up just a single VPS on Vultr… and by the time you’ve configured that VPS, I could have done a dozen revisions to the website, and it would still be more difficult to deploy updates to the VPS than to Vultr. Don’t even get me started on the complexity of a global CDN.

Do I wish all of Netlify was free? Sure, yes I do. Does this mean it’s not valuable? Of course not.

The irony of this is that you seem to be saying that (a) Netlify locks the customer in with useless features, and (b) it can be trivially reimplemented in an entirely custom but otherwise “free” VPS.

The real question is, which “free” VPS are you going to use that will serve the same capacity as Netlify’s paid plans? AWS? Do you think you can avoid lock-in using AWS - of all things?!

[shiftpgdn]

Oracle's free ARM VM offering can easily serve the same degree (actually significantly more) than a Netlify deployment.

[doctor_eval]

You’re really going to have to provide some figures to substantiate this. Bandwidth, volume and global TTFB would be a good start.

Also, by your own standards this is a comparison between a paid Netlify account and a free VM. Right?

[shiftpgdn]

No, you asked for a free comparison. If you want to go to paid features netlify loses by a mile. You can search all of this yourself with all of one google query.

[doctor_eval]

I didn't ask for anything. I am just responding to your comment. You said:

> Almost every feature you charge for is something you can achieve for free inside of a basic VPS

I have plenty of experience with both Netlify and VMs, and I don't think they are even remotely comparable.

> You can search all of this yourself with all of one google query.

You're the one making the claims - I'm not even sure what I would be searching for since the parameters of a VM are vastly different to those for Netlify. How could I even find TTFB for a free Oracle VM? In fact, my personal experience with Oracle VMs (granted it's from before 2018) is that the jitter would be very high, such that any TTFB would probably be meaningless. And it would depend on the deployment region, too. Not to mention the HTTP server being used.

Words are cheap. Unless you're willing to substantiate your claims with some actual facts, nobody learns anything.

[Takennickname]

You are definitely getting much much more with a free VPS than with netlify. Netlify's value is in being easy, not cheap. If your argument is for being cheap then you will lose that argument all day, every day.

[prng2021]

You know you have to secure, patch, and monitor a VPS right? Why pay for a VPS at all? You can get more compute, memory, and storage with a dedicated server for the same price and even setup multiple VMs on that server, each with all the features of a VPS “for free”.

[shiftpgdn]

I un-ironically agree.

[klysm]

Then go ahead and use a VPS…

[shiftpgdn]

The difference is I'm not out touting using a VPS as "The next generation of web development" and having payola articles written that if you don't use a VPS then your career is going to get left behind.

[cpursley]

Setting up a VPS - yeah, sooooo easy.

I struggle with even Digital Ocean and just want my site to freaking run.

Downvote me all you want, but I'd rather ship features than fuddle with infrastructure.

[ovao]

Setting up a VPS is pretty easy. Ensuring your VPS is configured to restart your app when the server restarts, maintaining OS and library updates, maintaining security, updating the app itself with simple-enough conventions, and configuring monitoring is not so necessarily easy. That’s not including documenting (even if only for your own future reference) how things are configured.

Digital Ocean in particular has great guides to get you from the starting line to something that in most cases will work okay, but as a long-term solution to “I have an app I want to run on some infrastructure”, I agree that there’s a non-zero cost to managing a server that, like you, I’d much rather not deal with.

[bdcravens]

And Dropbox is little more than rsync, but that doesn't mean that it's not valuable for someone, even if it's not you.