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Comment by porker | Hacker News Reader

$19/month is quite a jump up from free.

I set a business up to use Netlify to host a handful of legacy static sites (some with build processes, some without), because it was easier to do than S3 + Cloudfront.

They have a GitHub organisation account so looks like for the occasional updates I'll have to manually deploy.

If it was $5 or $10/month I doubt we'd give upgrading a second thought, but at this price point alternatives like build locally and SFTP to cheap shared hosting are worth the extra effort.

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This post reminds me that I'm upset at Netlify.

We're spending nearly $1000/mo in bandwidth charges on Netlify for serving totally static text files and a few images, which is absurd. I'm considering switching away from them outright. We can use `make` to run our own build, and CDNs are easy enough.

The fact that they charge per contributor when we already pay a lot is insult to injury.

I guess they're either trying to juice harder for a raise or slow losses to avoid other cuts. Whatever the case, I'm not very satisfied. I don't need the platform that badly, and we're definitely not locked in.

I'm going to file a ticket so I don't forget.

How many people you are serving those static files and images to and how much bandwidth does that consume. The fact that they are static sites reveals little about whether the charges are absurd.

Netlify doesn't make it easy to know this. Looking at my historical bills, they're littered with:

  1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
  1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
  1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
  1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
  2 Extra Bandwidth $110.00
  1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
  1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
  1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
  1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
  2 Extra Bandwidth $110.00
  1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
  2 Extra Bandwidth $110.00
  ...

For a single billing cycle. No cumulative totals.

I can only see the current month's bandwidth expenditures.

Cloudfront and similar CDNs charge peanuts compared to this.

If you wanted to set up a static site backed by a CDN in your own cloud account, check out withcoherence.com (I’m a cofounder). We also offer a built in Cloud IDE. Should be very simple to migrate from netlify and there won’t be any surprise bills since it’s your own cloud billing directly!

That's nice!

Thanks!

Just move to vercel while they're still free.

Or Microsoft github pages.

Or Atlassian bitbucket pages.

Or Netlify personal.

There is plenty of choice for free static hosting, within certain limits and that's basically marketing cost for their main business.

If that were to disappear because of recession / lack of VC money, we still have free cloudflare and if that were to fail and we need to start paying, bunnyCDN is fairly cheap.

Note that GitHub pages explicitly disallows using it for commercial pages, so this is not an option for any kind business website.

See https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github...

“ Prohibited uses

GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS). GitHub Pages sites shouldn't be used for sensitive transactions like sending passwords or credit card numbers.”

Sounds to me like they mean e-commerce-like sites, not websites for your average offline business

All business websites exist to facilitate commercial transactions. All of them.

it's at least unclear what falls under that very wide umbrella term, so any prudent business would stay clear off the github pages for their business website.

Vercel is not free if you want to use a repo in a Gitlab Group. It's kind of like Github organizations. They claim that a "team" is needed, in order to enable collaborations, and that is not free. So not really a viable alternative in this case.

Vercel is also only free "For personal or non-commercial projects." Otherwise starting at $20/mo/user no matter how few builds, requests, or bandwidth.

I'd recommend CloudFlare pages is a cool alternative. Super easy to setup and free too.

Seconded, it didn't work well in the beginning but lately it's been solid, and super fast.

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