Comment by Denzel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Denzel | Hacker News Reader

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At first I didn't understand the difference between Netlify vs. Jekyll / Hugo + s3_website [1] + S3/CloudFront + git. Admittedly, (1) the OP does a terrible job differentiating the two, and (2) there's significant overlap. Netlify is built for "dynamic" static websites, or rather JavaScript applications (whether they be single-page or not, it doesn't matter). It serves up a static page, and the JS and APIs do the rest.

So, for anyone who wants a basic breakdown between Netlify's features, and Jekyll + s3_website + S3/CloudFront + git/GitHub, here's the list of things BOTH support:

- Continuous Deployment

- Custom Domains / Domain Redirects / Domain Aliases

- Domain Redirects

- SSL (letsencrypt-s3front helps here [2])

- Redirects / Reverse Proxying (s3_website helps here with x-amz-redirect-location header [3])

- Headers / Custom Headers / Basic Auth

- Versioning and Rollbacks (handled with git)

Here's the list of things ONLY Netlify supports:

- GeoIP / language-based redirects (on their Enterprise Plan for $1,000/month)

- Form submissions [4]

- Analytics snippet injection [5] (albeit a little unnecessary for most developers)

- Atomic deploys [6]

- Prerending [7] (one of the most important and useful features)

Please, correct anything that's wrong.

Netlify's killer feature, for me, looks like prerending: rendering JS pages with a headless browser to help with SEO, with no work on the developer's end, is awesome! However, Netlify strikes me as far too expensive at $9/$49/$399/$1k per month. Especially with developers as their target market. That's too much for what little extra features it does offer.

Here's to hoping they can continue to differentiate themselves more.

[1]: https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website

[2]: https://github.com/dlapiduz/letsencrypt-s3front

[3]: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-page-r...

[4]: https://www.netlify.com/docs/form-handling

[5]: https://www.netlify.com/docs/inject-analytics-snippets

[6]: https://www.netlify.com/docs/versioning-and-rollbacks

[7]: https://www.netlify.com/docs/prerendering

EDIT: formatting

We have a pretty extensive comparison here of S3 vs Netlify:

https://www.netlify.com/blog/2015/03/06/comparing-netlify-an...

You're completely forgetting Continuous deployment in your comparison, which is a pretty big part of the modern static workflow. This includes things like pushing branches to different URLs, having a way to previewing pull requests, caching dependencies between runs, etc, etc... It's a huge part of our service.

Apart from that, if you ever work with static publishing and a CDN, and actually tried making the CDN cache your HTML assets, you'll instantly run into problems with instant cache invalidation and atomic deploys. You'll never run into these issues with netlify.

Rollbacks are possible with git, but previewing any version you've any deployed at any time are not something you can do.

Even basic things, like getting both your naked domain and the wwww domain to work correctly will often take developer time on that platform (how much do you bill your time at? Hopefully more than $49/month).

As for cost - our free plan is super generous and cover pretty much every thing you'll get with the alternative setup you mention. And for personal projects or open source projects we even give away our Pro plan for free!

The people that pay for our plans are typically not developers but their clients or employers who care about the best performance, highest uptime, and fastest speed of development.

Appreciate you taking the time to respond. It seems like you're targeting two different markets (developers & their clients/employers), and having to construct two different product stories. Of course, what appeals to the developer market doesn't necessarily appeal to their client/employers and vice versa.

I'm speaking as a freelance developer that's firmly in your target market, charging well in excess of $49/month, and delivering three static websites in the past month for clients, one being the University of Leiden. I understand very well what you're trying to solve, and pointed out the places where your product is superior.

Right now, it feels like your product is heavily slanted towards developers. And it feels like that's who you're asking to pay for the service. My clients couldn't careless about API proxying, deeper Git integration, or auto-building any branch to unique deploy URLs, even if that makes sense to me as a developer. They're not going to be working with those things. They wouldn't accept me saddling a $49/month charge upon them AFTER I've delivered the project and all they want to do is run a one-off script to deploy the website for minor updates to content over the next 3-5 years.

What I'm saying is, yes, Netlify makes it easier and eliminates servers for pre-rendering and form submissions. That fits the SaaS model. But I think you're missing out on another part of the market: the people willing to pay a one-off license per site for your deployment software, i.e., setup S3/CloudFront, SSL with Let's Encrypt, domain handling, a nice deployment pre-processing pipeline, preview past versions locally in browser, etc. in an automated fashion and then allow them to push updates with one command. That's what my clients want, and that's what I deliver to them. They'd be willing to pay $49, once, for that script (folded into their invoice).

If you don't need the features on the $49 dollar plan - why not just set them up with the free plan or the basic plan?

The people that pay for the $49/$349 or $1000 are typically clients with projects that are not simple "static sites". Typically these sites includes content management and requires a build to run everytime and editor triggers a change. They're often .com's for companies that always ends up needing proxying because they have legacy apps behind different URL

Other clients have in-house dev teams and run their main web application on Netlify with constant updates in different branches and pull requests, and Netlify lets them collabarote across these.

Again others just have large global presences and care about having someone to escalate to if there's a problem with a launch, any uptime, certificate, configuration issue or the like.

Those are the one that needs and use our Pro/Global/Enterprise tiers.

Being able to instantly go back to any previous version and click through the content without impacting the git workflow is a great feature.

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