Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z | Hacker News Reader

Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z

netlify.com

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I've never understood Netlify.

They are supposed to be targeted at static high performance blogs.

Yet their own blog is 15MB in size and over 100 different http requests.

See the YSlow report for their blog site below.

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.netlify.com/C6fG3uTg

It receives an "F" rating.

Isn't this kind of bloated website the exact problem Netlify is suppose to solve?

I don't need my doctor to be thin when he's telling me I need to lose fat, though.

I host my blog with their service, I get thousands of visitors a day and it's always extremely fast. I love the simple deployment and the features they give me, and I evangelize their service to everyone.

Try it out, it's fantastic, despite the large landing page.

I absolutely, obviously, would trust a thin doctor telling me to lose weight over a fat one telling me almost anything.

"Tu quoque" is a terrible basis for medical advice.

Even a thin doctor who stays thin with a terrible diet?

To be fair, 14.4MB of that is images (I don't know why some of them are that large, however). Does their offering specifically have something related to image optimization / scaling (I'm unfamiliar with Netlify)?

disclaimer: I work for netlify.

We do have image optimization built-in but it won't change images' size (in case you link externally - we don't want to move your cheese) or do anything lossy.

So - we have not resized and chosen optimal formats for those images and we are working on doing it right now :)

Please note I am truly rooting for you guys to make the web a better place.

But it's not just the blog I linked to above that's slow, it's even the blog post of this very HN post.

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.netlify.com/KdCXA8bB

54 http request (26 of which are JS) just seems kind of nuts for a blog post.

Not trying to make you guys look bad.

But clearly asset merging and image optimization are needed.

Netlify as a service doesn't really affect how you do things as a front-end developer, but we do help make sure that all those assets get to your browser as fast as can be.

But yes, we all agree that we should do a better job of making our website leaner and we do have a bunch of changes planned around that (and we're hiring!).

Congrats again on the funding. Your vision of a better web is inspiring. Wishing you and your team the best.

Honestly curious, was it slow on your browser? The entire website is ridiculously fast for me.

You mentioning this made me go and check it out myself and I got to say the page loads are very quick to the natural eye on my connection, FWIW. I would recommend other people check it out themselves as well.

I compared it to apple.com (since someone mentioned it in a lower comment) and apple.com had noticeable page loads whereas Netlify's blog didn't.

I am abroad on a slow 3G connection while nsurlsessiond is eating my bandwidth and the site was extremely slow (took more than a minute to load), while HN loads in 2~3s.

I'm sure the site is fast on a regular connection though.

The number of HTTP requests is not a big deal now with HTTP2. See here where it's no longer recommended to concatenate JS files:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/http-2-for-web-developers/

Is YSlow (which warns about too many HTTP requests) still updated? There's been no updates for 3 years here:

https://github.com/marcelduran/yslow

Actually, Netlify site performs WORSE using http2.

See the comparison:

https://www.dareboost.com/en/comparison/598b93730cf2aac95f75...

Is that because of the number of requests or a different reason though?

Hah, I read "Who Moved My Cheese?" a while ago but I haven't seen it used as an idiom like this. Nice one!

only 600kb of text on a landing page?

That's about the same size as _Walden_ by Thoreau. Seems large.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-0.txt

This is definitely the most flattering insult we received in this thread ;)

Netlify is wonderful. I never thought to check if they dogfood their product, though. Sometimes, resources are allocated to new features and site redesign/restructuring work gets pushed to the back burner.

The cobbler's children have no shoes.

That is funny Apple's site received a C and I typically consider them image heavy https://gtmetrix.com/reports/apple.com/1IDcUYV1

Interesting to see the changes of their product packaging (and price) over time:

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20141020025157/https://www.netli...

2. https://web.archive.org/web/20160505192926/https://www.netli...

3. https://web.archive.org/web/20170221195249/https://www.netli...

4. https://www.netlify.com/pricing/

The model of charging per site was removed in [4], the "low tier" $9 per site was also removed, maybe it was not differentiated enough from the free version to be worth the effort. It also seems they introduced "paying per user" in between [3] and [4], maybe that was a form of substitute for the removal of the site limit.

Disclosure: I am a founder of a cloud hosting startup called Sourcevoid, that's in part why I think looking at pricing and packaging of hosting services is interesting, but thought others might like seeing the links above as well.

Netlify is really good for static sites, but you can also combine their static site resources with Flatmarket or Snipcart and create ecommerce sites as well.

I'd suggest checking out their blog (https://www.netlify.com/blogs/), they have a ton of tutorials on the multiple static site generators they support

https://www.netlify.com/tags/tutorial/

Awesome service so far. The Continuous Deployment flow is awesome with deploy previews, CDN, custom routing, Automatic SSL from Let's Encrypt. The SSL can be improved to be true automatic without a provisioning step (first hit issues a cert)

We're working on that! Main challenge is in making sure we don't inadvertently get people's domains stuck in Let's Encrypts rate limiting...

I mean... It takes just one click to get the SSL. That is already far easier than I've seen from any other service.

It can be easier. We've used https://github.com/GUI/lua-resty-auto-ssl to provide SSL provisioning on the fly at my previous company for our customers` custom domains. This also means that there is no downtime at all when they change the DNS record from their old servers to the new one

Static sites are becoming more and more popular -- you can host them on CDNs across the globe, they can be cached client-side, pre-loaded, work offline....

Especially important thinking about the billions of people in developing countries accessing the Internet over 2G connections.

If the trend towards static sites continues, Netlify could be the next Heroku.

Personally, I use Netlify to host my Gatsby blog; all I need to do is `git push` and they handle the rest.

For me the biggest appeal of static sites is that I now have significantly less attack surface to think about. The chances of someone finding an RCE in Amazon S3 are way less than than the same occurring on some old Apache 2 server where auto-update broke a couple months ago because of the linux kernel headers eating up all my inodes.

> Static sites are becoming more and more popular

Indeed.

I literally just finished showing my daughter (10) and son (12) how to move their stuff from codepen.io to surge.sh[1]

The future is static :)

[1] a Vancouver based Netlify "competitor".

You can use heroku for static sites and it already is that easy (well, kinda... git push heroku master)

You definitely can, but it's not designed or optimized for static sites. And I think there's plenty you can do to improve performance when an app server isn't needed.

I moved some static sites to Netlify from S3 because it seemed easier than getting HTTPS working on S3. It certainly was, and I haven't looked back. The automatic generation of a static site from the repo is a killer feature I didn't know I needed until I tried it.

Congrats to the team!

Yeah, I loved them too really great service that is forward thinking. They work great for large apps or corporate sites, but for small/personal sites their pricing model doesn't work so well, which I can understand.

For instance I needed simple http auth on some directories in a site, and to get that it's $45/month. I ended up with caddy on a $5 digital ocean droplet which automatically sets up and renews the lets encrypt SSL for you. Caddy really is pretty damn nice.

For small/personal sites the pricing model is "Free". I think that tends to work well :)

Not so much when you need a feature not included in free. And free is always subject to change.

disclaimer: I work for Netlify.

We've changed pricing models 3 times since I've worked here. Each time we've grandfathered people in at their old pricing level, and the last change also gave away substantially more features for free. Never have we moved someone's cheese from "free" to "not free".

I understand that this is still a risk - I'm not promising it will never happen - but we have a killer track record of giving away more, not less, over time, and never have we changed the pricing for an existing site (except to give away enough features that many folks downgraded from paid to free with the last change - and even that was opt-in in case you for some reason wanted to keep paying us :D )

The features not included in free are not typically things you can't do without for personal projects (ie, password protection, role based access control, role management for team members, etc...)

Password protection is a pretty basic need and need not cost $45/month. Of course the role/team based stuff for $45/month makes perfect sense because those are only applicable on larger projects.

I've never found a need for password protection on any of the small personal projects I've worked on. But I guess I could imagine some use cases where that would be nice to have.

HTTPS on S3 is quite easy, only requiring the addition of CloudFront.

It looks like there's quite a bit involved: https://medium.com/@sbuckpesch/setup-aws-s3-static-website-h...

Sure it's "easy" in the sense that the hardest part is editing some JSON, but with Netlify once the site is set up it's literally one click to provision and apply an SSL cert.

Netlify is amazing. It is so easy, a pleasure to use for static sites and react apps, continuous deployment is awesome, and open source projects are (for now and hopefully for the long run!) FREE.

Huge, huge fangirl. Keep it up, Netlify!!!

Way to go Netlify. I've been a customer since BitBalloon and this team does great work in a trend that I'm really glad to see.

Edit: a downvote? Really?

HN moderation is notoriously downvote happy. Bite the bullet and move on.

  Join the conversation on Hacker News

Just FYI, this is linking to post submission

We use netlify for quite sometime with Hugo and we loved it.

Today, we use firebase hosting which is significantly cheaper and comes with its own CDN and free Google SSL. But I don't get CI from my git repo - I have to compile and push. Which I personally prefer.

But kudos to Netlify - I hope they realise that the value is not in CDN or CI or ssl certificates . But rather in building a CMS for static websites.

> But rather in building a CMS for static websites

They're working on that https://www.netlifycms.org

Have you checked the pricing recently? I think it's likely to have changed quite dramatically since after you switched to Firebase.

Well the first priced tier is 45$ per month. It's many times what we end up paying to firebase.

Not that I'm saying it's a bad deal - it's great for people on WordPress or Drupal.

Do you need any paid features? The only things you get for $45 are:

- simple password protection (basic auth or single-password-no-login)

- small division of power - not everyone can delete the site and invite contributors.

Everything else is included for free.

Awesome! Great to hear. I've pretty much automated my startup ( https://discoverdev.io ) to work on their infrastructure. And the best part is everything comfortably fits into the free tier.

All the collection and curation happens in the backend (on my laptop), get jinja to generate the data into a html and in a single command goes live! This product has been a life saver. No monitoring, cacheing, or any other headache.

Virtual hi-fi to the people who make Netlify.

Netlify also has HTTP 2 server push https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/07/18/http/2-server-push-o...

And headers in general https://www.netlify.com/docs/headers-and-basic-auth/

Disclaimer: A very happy free customer

Read that as Netflix the first time. Was confused since Netflix's valuation is well past $50b+

Netlify employee here - this is even funnier when it happens from the inside. There's a moment after working here for a fairly short time when you start typing "net..." into your browser and the autocomplete has turned from netflix into netlify. Somewhat of a rite of passage ;)

Yeh, not a fan of the name, and not just for the obvious reason. I'm honestly not even sure how to say it properly. There's too many syllables for such a short name.

Think "simplify" but with "net" :)

Ah, I never thought about it that way until now.

In any case, I'm a huge fan of Netlify. Thanks for the service!

Thanks for the mental reference... it's still a terrible name though.

Yeah, especially when the HN page looks like this - http://i.imgur.com/hpnAiim.png

Seems like Netlify is the offspring if CloudFlare and Heroku had a child.

I am using Google Cloud Storage as my origin and CloudFlare for few corporate static sites, and it works fantastic. Get CDN, http/2, free SSL, and cost is literally cents.

Deployment is simple with the gsutil cli:

  // regex excludes dotfiles recursively
  gsutil rsync -R -x '^\/?(?:\w+\/)*(\.\w+)' directory-to-sync-here gs://bucket-here

I love Netlify and how much they support open source projects (thanks!). Hosting a quick mockup is very easy: drag-and-drop zip, done. It comes with Lets Encrypt SSL, CDN, deploy preview and history.

Love love love Netlify! Moved my blog from Tumblr (lol - but it was free!) to Netlify with Hugo as the static site generator. A wonderful experience. With little effort, my blog now has SSL, auto-deploys after I git check-in, and is a million times faster. I wrote a tiny bit about the migration process: https://www.netkow.com/moving-from-tumblr-to-hugo-netlify/

Awesome! Given the somewhat excessive egress prices charged by AWS/S3 and GCP/Cloud Storage for sites hosted on those services, I've always considered Netlify (and others with similar services) as the companion piece to Lambda/Cloud Functions in the "how to go serverless and save money" playbook. It's great to see them getting some VC love since it will make them an easier sell in corporate environments.

I'm using their open-sourced Netlify-CMS for a static-site, and it's been wonderful. If you also have the site hosted by Netlify, they streamline the github push webhook for you that the CMS depends on, which is really nice when you're starting out.

I really like where Netlify is going and how they embrace open source to achieve their goals. There's just one thing I miss in their mix: strong typing. No Elm, PureScript or ReasonML (just yet).

Co-founder here - Thanks so much!

We do use Elm for a couple of minor projects ourself, and it works great on our platform. We also have plenty of people using Typescript or Flow with Netlify.

That's on your end though, I don't see anything they need to do to support other languages

I'm a big user of Netlify, and host a number of sites with well over a million views a year and they have been rock solid, quick builds, quick support. I can't wait for them to take off!

Does anyone have details regarding their CDN? Competitors tend to give information on their locations so that you can decide if it works for your audience. Cloudflare even delivers information on the edge node in the header to check where the closest one is.

Is there anything like this for netlify? Or any benchmarks on how they generally perform vs. fastly and cloudflare?

I use Netlify as well, great service! From my quick tests their home-grown CDN seems on par with CloudFront et al, hard to go wrong.

On the main page there's an interactive tutorial

$ npm install netlify -g /usr/local/bin/netlify -> /usr/local/lib/node_modules/netlify-cli/bin/cli.js ├── left-pad@0.0.3 ├── isarray@1.0.0 ├── is-positive-integer@1.1.1 ├── babel@6.5.2

I hope this was a joke because it made me laugh a lot

Sure is ;)

I'm sure there's a jquery plugin to add variables somewhere.

This is interesting, I just tested it out and its pretty flawless.

For a standard React FE app, why use this vs Heroku vs S3?

Netlify provides a global cdn and administrative features targeting statically generated pages.

S3 is more generic in its goals so it doesn't provide either.

Heroku on the other hand can host server applications which Netlify cannot so it is really a different service. You could host an API on heroku and the react app on Netlify.

probably the best reason is: we have our CDN spread over 4 different cloud providers. AWS and Digital Ocean could both go down (completely - though we're in several different data centers for each) and it would keep on keepin' on.

Wasn't aware of Netlify until now - the product looks great!

I think I'll try it out with some upcoming projects.

Just published my first application on Netlify yesterday. I looked at Surge.sh but their pricing doesn't include the SSL certificate. Netlify SSL with Let's Encrypt was literally a button press. Good stuff!

I used surge.sh for a while and I found they had significant downtime on several occasions. Hasn't happened to me so far with Netlify.

Gitlab on-prem support coming? That would make me very likely to switch especially because I think it would make it much easier to spin up review apps for our SPA's

We do support GitLab on prem already, but right now it doesn't let you trigger deploy previews and branch deploys. Currently that's something we can help with on the custom plan, but we do hope to bring it to the normal tiers as well.

oh nice! thats a welcome change - seems like last time I looked wasnt even 6 months ago and it was not there yet - branch deploys would be one of my exact use cases for sure

disclaimer: i work at Netlify.

ping us in support and I can talk you through the setup w/the private repo (and branch deploys can be simulated with a few netlify sites attached to the same repo - no additional cost for additional sites on any plan)

If we at GitLab can help please let us know.

Congrats! Hope they do great things with it. Use them to host a middleman site and love the service.

Anything on the roadmap for supporting server-side (api, db, etc.) in the same way?

Disclaimer: I work for Netlify

If you check out this blog post about one of our biggest customers, you can see that there are some non-static services involved (look for the list of 4 services all called Go<something>):

https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/03/16/smashing-magazine-ju...

So - while I wouldn't say we're planning to become a DB host or anything - we are both open to providing some glue needed to bring some missing pieces together for static sites without vendor lock in (all of those are open source and you can run your own instances - they are also all being polished up right now so keep an eye on the one(s) that interest you)...and we are trying to enable other services we don't want to reinvent - things like auth0 and firebase - for interoperability with our service.

oh yeah, and we also open sourced a CMS that uses Git as a backing store so your content editors won't have to learn markdown or git... https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms

So - we're not done yet :)

There are a few things you can do from static sites; authorization services, database as a service, backend as a service, etc. I find people find theses things appealing in the abstract yet rarely build anything with them. I built a dbaas that failed myself. For example, what dynamic functionality would you like to add to your dynamic site?

I'm thinking of explicitly non-static sites, enabling SaaS offerings. I'd like to see the ease of use and functionality for static sites extended across the full stack.

I'm working on something along these, lines. If you or anyone else is interested in early access, please contact me (email in profile).

Congratulations to the founders and team - a great product and great service!

Congratulations for a great round with a great team and an awesome future!

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