I hear you, discontinuing products that you're dependent on is painful, but discontinuing services that you built your infrastructure around is an outright killer.
you're absolutely right :) We did change it recently. Now Netlify Pages (Free plan) includes Custom Domain and HTTPS. It also gives you Continuous Delivery. Again, completely free of charge.
Lastly, any open source project get's the Pro Plan (normally $49 per month) for free as well :)
Great tutorial. Really well written, I'll check out what else you've written for sure.
It is how ever ~20 pages long. And all of it can be done with a _single_ commandline in Netlify. Just saying :)
I'm from Netlify. The point of the platform is that it's like 9 services in one. With free SSL that is renewed automatically and free hosting of Custom Domains. It also provides a specialized CDN that does Instant Cache Invalidation even while highly cached, atomic deploys, Continuous Delivery, Prerendering, Formhandling, and so much more.
Perhaps you are thinking of static sites being merely tiny sites that have little or no updating, and doesn't need much of a workflow around it, and offers few features.
There are solutions that's great for a small personal blog or a prototype.
But if you are looking to do commercial sites, from smaller sites, to large enterprise sites with hundreds of contributors, multiple languages, and tens of thousands of HTML pages, then a viable and performant workflow is needed. This is what Netlify does. Integrates and automates all the services that goes in to deploying and maintaining a commercial-grade modern static site.