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Comment by juliansimioni | Hacker News Reader

This has been the third major outage for Netlify in the last few weeks.

I like the company, they have good people on their team, and their interface and functionality is great (deploy previews are so nice!).

But this is probably the last straw, as the static portion of our company's website has been down for 45 minutes now.

Fortunately, the beauty of a static site is they're quite easy to host anywhere.

We're already on AWS, and it's easy enough to set up CloudFront. It won't be _quite_ as quick to deploy but it will probably rarely if ever break. Guess that's my task for the day :(

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We're in the same boat, and when Netlify blames an "upstream provider", what I hear is that they don't have a backup plan.

They're giving us plenty of time to research alternatives while our site is down though.

Based on the comment from bobfunk, it seems they do have a backup plan but not all customers use a configuration which takes advantage of it.

A backup plan that does not service apex domains is not really a backup plan.

It sounds like it does handle apex domains, but only if you're using Netlify DNS or a provider which supports CNAME flattening. Assuming the potential problems with not doing so are disclosed during setup (not sure if they were) that actually seems pretty reasonable to me.

I run the Netlify Support team, and this statement from @michaelmior is correct: apex domains are served using redundant, global CDN if you use Netlify's DNS hosting, or Flattened CNAMEs from Cloudflare.

It seems that a lot of people didn't have backup plans either. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to rely on just one provider for something critical.

You should checkout Cloudflare Pages. For static stuff it’s a dream to setup, and you get previews out of the box.

The main advantage that AWS will have for us over anything else is that, since AWS already manages our DNS, we are going to be able to offer our visitors the best performance by using geo-specific IP addresses.

The static site in question for us lives at the apex record (mywebsite.com), so it's generally not possible for other providers to do this without having them manage our entire DNS infrastructure, which we aren't willing to do.

In fact I think this is part of why we've had so many issues with Netlify. It's clear their preferred way to host apex domain sites is to manage the DNS completely.

I think cloudflare can do it. They give you the option to set A records for your domain, in your own DNS.

Cloudflare runs an AnyCast[0] network and multiple peers, so even through your using static IPs, the traffic will still get routed to Cloudflare nearest PoP, and pages is served by their edge network, so your site will be served from the location nearest to your customer. All without DNS shenanigans.

[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/cdn/glossary/anyca...

Cloudflare pages is in beta and right now lacks many features that Netlify has, while also containing some showstopping issues (https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/known-issue...)

Why wouldn't CloudFront be quite as quick, out of interest?

I think they're talking about the setup/configuration time. Netlify is pretty much one click.

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