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Comment by cutler | Hacker News Reader

I think you're overplaying the "static" card. If you're using the JAMstack the static bit is only half of the equation. Need a contact form? Now you need a form-processing service and it's no longer static. If you're replacing old PHP + MySQL sites you'll need a lot more than a static site generator. "Mostly static" might be more accurate but then how long does that last? Clients typically want WordPress plus a ton of plugins. I don't see how JAMstack addresses that need. You say it's nearly 100% free but I just looked at Netlify's free tier and you're only allowed 100 form submissions per month after which they're $19 each. I don't think I would get a night's sleep with that hanging over my head.

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It's up to you when you think a traditional server back-end is still warranted, there are certainly still cases where it makes sense. But if all you need is a contact form, then I'd argue that it doesn't make sense! Yes, I agree, Netlify Forms is a rip-off, if you need more than the free limit of 100 submissions per month (which personally I don't, but of course many people do). But there are many other options for simple form handling, I'd recommend looking into them. And the JAMstack can compete quite well with WordPress and co these days, check out https://myclientwants.com/

The thing is I only picked on forms off the top of my head. There's a ton of functionality in your average client site which I can't imagine JAMstack catering for without it costing a lot more than hosting it on a VPS. JAMstack seems to cater for the painting by numbers model of web development but that's only a small fraction of what clients need. The JAMstack equivalent of a typical WordPress site, I imagine, would have to pull-in a dozen external services costing a lot more than the VPS alternative. Netlify make a big deal about the low-cost scalability of the CDN factor in JAMstack but it's only low-cost when you don't use external services. It's quite the opposite, I've heard, once you've outgrown static and need a third party service for every new feature.

That’s right. Plus you miss out on control, functionality, optimization, flexibility on the dev side and predictability and simplicity on the business side. It turns things upside down and for the type of work we do these are exactly the wrong tradeoffs.

Agreed. I used to be on the JAMstack train, but when your dynamic needs grows, you site has more and more dependencies and some are vendor specific such as Netlify. Now I have simplified all to use just one web stack for simple static site, to crud site to rest api backend, running from container. Minimise vendor dependency so I can easily move around be it self hosted at home, vps, AWS, Cloud Run or whatever. Rather than creating more Netlify clone, I hope HN crowd can create Cloud Run clones that let you easily host a container, not just static pages.

> It's up to you when you think a traditional server back-end is still warranted

All the cases outside of "oh, I dump my thoughts on the page once a year".

Even for a blog in the modern world I would like:

- automatic crossposting to Twitter and Facebook

- automatic retrieval and reformatting of external content (because, for example, twitter embeds are very cumbersome, heavy and slow)

- automatic retrieval of video and images from external sites (youtube, instagram, twitter etc.) because of link rot

- delayed publishing

- search

- and a plethora of other things

Yes, you can stitch togethe a bunch of "serverless" stuff for this, but you've just "replaced" the "traditional server backend" with a bunch of traditional server backends.

JAMstack isn't really serverless at all. It's a myth.

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