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Comment by jacobpake | Hacker News Reader

In my experience you can achieve a lot with FaaS - but you still need an API, database and storage - which Netlify Functions doesn’t offer out of the box. I have a couple of sites deployed on Netlify with a ‘serverless’ backend deployed to AWS separately.

Their functions are also limited to triggers relating only to Netlify events: https://docs.netlify.com/functions/trigger-on-events/#availa...

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> Their functions are also limited to triggers relating only to Netlify events

to be clear the functions are also exposed to the public internet as http endpoints so you can ping them from anywhere else, including, for example, your frontend app, or Zapier [1], or GitHub Actions or cron service of your choice

(i work at netlify)

1: https://www.netlify.com/blog/2018/11/07/automate-your-netlif...

Netlify is glorified S3 + Cloudfront hosting.

They did a very good job at marketing "HTML5 hosting"

It's glorified in the sense that it's much cheaper. I have had small sites on s3 plus cf and have gotten a bill that boggles the mind because I could be hosting the content for free on netlify.

As someone who is currently hosting a static site with S3 + CloudFront, I'd be interested to hear more about this. Were you hosting something more heavyweight than mostly text?

Make sure that you've set the correct cache control headers on the S3 objects. So "Max age" should be something far future for static assets and something near future for HTML files.

If you forget that then Cloudfront will retrieve the objects from S3 every time there is any activity on your site and your bill will go up really fast.

This is precisely why netlify's offering is valuable. It works out of the box with zero config. If you're using a common static site generator you don't even need to setup the build process, just give it your git repo, and push when you want to deploy.

That's not really a compelling reason when it's literally a single input field on a form to setup. Also, if you're in the business of web development, HTTP cache control headers are something you should know about regardless.

As with a lot of AWS, it's easy if you know you need to do it, but there are a lot of gotchas which can be very expensive if hit (and there's no way to limit expenditure).

Any devs out there with a Visual Studio/MSDN as subscription should also be aware of their free Azure credit. I get 50$/Mo, which is more than enough to host a static site with CDN (my blog typically runs at around 1-2$).

> I get 50$/Mo

For how long? I remember I got something similar for AWS for a year. Hosted my Wordpress, year passed, then prices jumped up. I migrated to Netlify, rebuilding my site as a static one, hosted for free now.

If you regularly serve bigger files but have low traffic DigitalOcean S3 Spaces and a custom Cloudflare Workers CDN might be an interesting solution for you. Cloudflare Workers are based only on requests and priced at 5$/10M and if you cache everything heavily DO’s 5$ S3 plan should be enough for most use cases. (I’m not affiliated with either company)

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