Hacker News Reader

Comment by Thorentis | Hacker News Reader

I don't work for them or anything, but I've honestly found Netlify to be the absolute easiest solution for static site hosting. And it's free! There are some paid features, but the free stuff is all you need. You can use SSL, accept form inputs through request capturing, automate deployments with Github/Gitlab hooks, auto generate static pages for most popular static site generators (Jekyll, Hugo, etc.) Absolute breeze to use. Beats any hacky AWS solution hands down imo.

View on HN

I recommend using AWS Amplify if you need to stay within AWS.

The full product can be compared to Google Firebase but the Amplify Console specifically offers features similar to Netlify on top of standard AWS services (S3/CF/Codebuild).

I find it a much better experience than manually setting up S3/CF websites because of the out-of-the-box features that simply wouldn't happen otherwise for a static site like:

- instant cache invalidation

- branch deployments (with password protection & rollbacks)

- deployment process only deploys modified files

- simple custom headers

- simple redirects (redirecting individual assets in Cloudfront is not easy)

Agreed, Netlify is fantastic.

Another thing I really like, though I wouldn't really recommend it for corporate sites (but I would recommend it for personal sites because of the community/purpose) is Gitlab + Neocities. I use Gitlab CI to build my site, rclone to copy it to Neocities, and that's it.

Very simple, no-hassle combination with loads of bandwidth (I think my paid account has 3 TB/mo).

I enjoy it so much (since 2017) that i'm going to london Jamstack !

I love Netlify as well; it's dead simple and works out of the box. Occasionally I do run into issues where the builds get 'stuck' and never processed, so I have to manually cancel the build and re-run it.

I've also had Russian users tell me that Netlify is sometimes blocked in Russia and can't access the sites but it may sporadic.

From your link:

> No, netlify.com is probably not blocked in Russia. Yet.

> Details: > URL http://netlify.com

> Domain netlify.com

> IP 134.209.226.211

Is it intermittent?

Also, any idea why they would be blocked, or is that part of the problem?

This is what I see

https://isitblockedinrussia.com/?host=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.netl...

> Yes! It appears that https://www.netlify.com/ is currently blocked in Russia.

> Details:

> URL

> https://www.netlify.com/

> Domain

> www.netlify.com

> IP

> 167.99.137.12

> Decision 27-31-2018/Ид2971-18 made on 2018-04-16 by Генпрокуратура.

> This block affects IP 167.99.0.0/16.

My understanding is that the blocks are accidental side effects from the Great Telegram Blockage of 2018 [0] but I'm not entirely sure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia

Actually came here to ask the advantage of something like this over Netlify. I gave up midway through the article because I couldn't figure out the point.

Maybe an overly simple and dumb question but have to ask: What's the big difference between hosting static sites on services like these and just going with a regular webhost like Bluehost and slapping in something like a wordpress template? This is what a lot of blogs, landing pages and even fairly static small business or organization sites seem to do without problems and it's all pretty user.friendly for the non-developer crowd (me included)

Static sites are faster, more secure and cheaper to host than Wordpress. Comes at the expense of user friendlyness.

Thanks for the clarification, all of you. "Turdpress" gave me a chuckle. That said, honestly would like to know so I can explore this further, are there any resources or guides you could recommend that lay out how to build a secure and straightforward static site in this way? For someone who isn't a developer by profession.

People have been coming up with solutions to the 'make a basic business website' problem since the 90s, when Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and NetObjects Fusion fought it out, and computer magazines would mail out their entire website on the CD on the magazine's cover, for readers without web access.

At this point, there are a great many ways to skin a cat.

Assuming you've got $5 a month or so, it mostly comes down to personal preferences about workflow, vendor independence, security, reputation, and who you already have an account with.

I asked below but no answer, so hopefully not bothering but I ask again here. Any solid guide or resource you could recommend on doing just this, building a static site with these services while not using wordpress and typical hosting services like bluehost etc.

Because your static .html and .css files won't get immediately hacked like an out-of-date turdpress site will.

There are many wordpress-like tools that spit out static files to upload to your hosting provider https://www.staticgen.com/

Agree, Netlify is awesome.

We recently moved our static sites from S3+CloudFront to Netlify.

The S3+CF combination is clever, and very, very cheap. But it gets messy when you want to add things like custom headers and lots of redirect rules.

Netlify is indeed very easy to use, but (at least here in Europe), I find their performance disappointing. Sites that shouldn't need more than a hundred milliseconds to load take a couple of seconds. Of course I can't really complain about a free product, but if it weren't free, I wouldn't be using it still.

I never noticed, but now that you mention it, there's like a 3s delay when loading my page, and then the page loads in 300ms... Strange. I wonder whether a paid version would improve the performance?

Stick Cloudflare in front of it.

Is using Netlify easier than using GitHub pages?

Netlify does more than GitHub pages, it also builds, so with GitHub pages, you also need to use GitHub Actions. Netlify also has some other services they provide.

I've never had to use Github actions to deploy to Github pages (pages existed long before actions did). You only need to do something like that if you want them to build for you- with static I prefer to build myself (Hugo makes that fast).

Agree, Netlify is simple and easy to setup even for beginners. I am hosting my domain for past 1 year integrating with Github. Haven't had any issue so far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com