We are also building a real, longterm sustainable enterprise business. We're not a non-profit and we're here to create a big lasting company that can keep investing into the future of the web.
Almost every feature you charge for is something you can achieve for free inside of a basic VPS. I understand you have the classic SV "Hotel California" model where you can check in but you can never leave. But frankly this makes the internet worse in every way possible and part of the point of the original article.
Seriously, it is orders of magnitude faster to deploy a static website on Netlify - simply drag and drop a folder from desktop - than it is to spin up just a single VPS on Vultr… and by the time you’ve configured that VPS, I could have done a dozen revisions to the website, and it would still be more difficult to deploy updates to the VPS than to Vultr. Don’t even get me started on the complexity of a global CDN.
Do I wish all of Netlify was free? Sure, yes I do. Does this mean it’s not valuable? Of course not.
The irony of this is that you seem to be saying that (a) Netlify locks the customer in with useless features, and (b) it can be trivially reimplemented in an entirely custom but otherwise “free” VPS.
The real question is, which “free” VPS are you going to use that will serve the same capacity as Netlify’s paid plans? AWS? Do you think you can avoid lock-in using AWS - of all things?!
Also, by your own standards this is a comparison between a paid Netlify account and a free VM. Right?
> Almost every feature you charge for is something you can achieve for free inside of a basic VPS
I have plenty of experience with both Netlify and VMs, and I don't think they are even remotely comparable.
> You can search all of this yourself with all of one google query.
You're the one making the claims - I'm not even sure what I would be searching for since the parameters of a VM are vastly different to those for Netlify. How could I even find TTFB for a free Oracle VM? In fact, my personal experience with Oracle VMs (granted it's from before 2018) is that the jitter would be very high, such that any TTFB would probably be meaningless. And it would depend on the deployment region, too. Not to mention the HTTP server being used.
Words are cheap. Unless you're willing to substantiate your claims with some actual facts, nobody learns anything.
Netlify’s free plan is awesome. You might get more bandwidth with a VPS. But you won’t get a CDN and you won’t get atomic deployments without a bunch of work. You’ll use half your VPS storage on the operating system. You’ll need to keep updating your software and maintaining backups. You’ll spend hours or weeks a year maintaining this thing, versus zero for Netlify.
It’s not just about the cost of bandwidth or storage. You gotta compare like with like.
1. Full server control (install any package) 2. Host any kind of server - Django, Rails, etc. etc. 3. Run database servers: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc. 4. Background processes (cron or systemd) 5. Run VPNs and proxy servers for personal use at the same time. 6. Host email servers 7. Multi-purpose usage (Use for remote dev environments, cloud storage, AI/ML platforms, etc.)
All. For. *Free*.
I struggle with even Digital Ocean and just want my site to freaking run.
Downvote me all you want, but I'd rather ship features than fuddle with infrastructure.
Digital Ocean in particular has great guides to get you from the starting line to something that in most cases will work okay, but as a long-term solution to “I have an app I want to run on some infrastructure”, I agree that there’s a non-zero cost to managing a server that, like you, I’d much rather not deal with.