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.
Co-founder of netlify here. We're getting hit pretty heavily right now, with links to people asking for what alternatives to divshot exists, and what you need from a hosting service that specializes in static sites and apps.
So thought I'd post here both congratulating James and Divshot, and secondly (of course) tell a bit about our service, and what we think a hosting service for static site should be able to provide.
At netlify we have a multilayered CDN, which makes us faster than anyone else at the moment. At the same time it enables us to have true instant cache invalidation. That means that your changes to a static site is live in 1 second, but only the affected files get invalidated - the rest stays cached. All deploys are atomic, and there's never a chance end users will browse an broken version of your site.
We also do continuous deployment. That means every time you push to git (GitHub, GitLabs, BitBucket or your selfhosted git-repo), we automatically build and deploy the new version of your site. It doesn't matter if you use static site generators or build tools like grunt, gulp, Ember CLI, etc...
Besides this we have a ton of features like API proxying, rewrites and redirect rules, HTTP2, SSL (both SNI and full), staging sites, password protection, DNS hosting, Geo IP based redirect, choose between CLI or drag'n'drop interface, advanced DDOS protection, a full REST API for all features and much more.
I was going to reply, but what you said :P
.. I think it's great that initiatives like this are taken, but of course a market fit is important if you want to make a dent.
From push to git to live site in 6 seconds... Go is so fast.. One less reason to use traditional dynamic sites. Sites made with a modern static site generator, on a properly configured true CDN, perhaps with a dynamic widget or two, is so much faster, safer, simpler to optimise, and cheaper to scale than traditional php or .net sites that for most sites it's starting to not make sense to do anything else ..
Great advice.
I am co-founder of the company, so we can make a company insurance (were thinking to do it that way anyhow). But then the question is what plan to get as a company?
Exactly, and because of the automatic URL rewriting Netlify will also give you instant cache validation. So when you update your site, unlike most static site hosts, you won't have to wait to see your changes live. But at the same time you get a very cached and very fast site. So best of both worlds.
Thanks so much for the shout out, we appreciate it, and are happy that you like it. And for you and any one reading this, let us know if there are any features you'd like and we'll get right on it.