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Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

I must be an oddball because these services never really made sense to me.

I don't want to use their CI. I already have CI for running tests and other validations. I don't want to have a separate single-threaded CI stack with bare minimum features for building the site.

These all have "atomic" deploys which cause problems with hash-named assets as you get 404s during the transition.

What I basically want is something that I can rsync to and that is served by a CDN. I've ended up with S3+CloudFront but it doesn't have all of the nice features you may want from a static site host like index pages, but that is pretty easy to work around.

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Same. I don't want to have to reimplement all my CI logic if I change hosting providers. I'm surprised so many vendors assume the opposite.

When I surveyed static hosting providers about a year ago, the only ones I found that didn't insist on taking over your CI pipeline were Netlify[0] and Firebase. I assume it's possible on Cloudflare and AWS, too, but I wanted to go with a provider where static hosting is core to their business.

I've been happy with Netlify, but given how deeply they bury their "manual deploy" feature, I fear the day that they decide to force everyone into the Netlify-native build workflow.

[0] https://docs.netlify.com/cli/get-started/#manual-deploys

might sound crazy but I still love drag and drop a whole Dir into netlify still, its a beautiful method using a computer mouse and it works quite well and takes seconds.

Reminds me of what I used to do 25 years ago with FTP :)

... into Windows Commander :)

...or Double Commander

I used to do that, but recently decided to try out deployment using Netlify CLI—and quickly decided never to drag-and-drop again, if I can help it! Now all I do is `make dev`, and if it looks good, `make netlify-deploy-prod`. Even faster than opening Netlify, going to the site, going to Deploy, and dragging and dropping. But I’m glad that it’s still an option, if I need it.

Yeah, I do sometimes use Netlify because it is so simple to set up. And you can deploy by POSTing them a zip archive which is quite a convenient API.

It largely makes up for their really basic build environment. Last I tried it you can basically pick between Ubuntu versions with some pre-installed software. If you wanted to use an unavailable tool you could either manually download it or you were out of luck.

I've done both on Vercel. Their git repo connections can run basic CI for you on commits to certain branches etc. But you can also just use their CLI as part of your own CI process to deploy to them.

I've used Vercel for static sites and don't really need a CI in these cases. It's a matter of pushing changes to a git repo and waiting a few seconds to see the changes published. I previously used GitHub pages but found Vercel to be a better experience all around.

> What I basically want is something that I can rsync to and that is served by a CDN...

Genuine question: and what would you pay (monthly/yearly) for such service? Let's say CDN serves all visitors from EU/NA.

I developed a service for similar purposes last year (I became tired of S3..), but I had some "blockers" with pricing strategies and I'm not a PR person so the product gained very little traction. It's offline now due to my other commitments but I'm keen to look into re-starting it again if there's enough interest.

If hash named assets are those #! URLs then I say good riddance.

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