2,084 karma · joined October 21, 2008
There's still some work ahead to make this really smooth, but the idea is to give simple ways to work with shortcodes, etc, without having to be aware of the syntax.
We made the backend for the test open-source - it's a very straight forward Go binary that we run in several data centers around the world.
https://github.com/netlify/speedy
The test focus on global performance, which might not be relevant to everybody - but for ourself it really does! We have users all over the world and as we've been building out our product we've seen a pretty clear correlation between opening up a new PoP on our CDN, and starting getting clients from that region. The performance matters.
For the article itself - it's obviously not as lightweight as motherfuckingwebsite.com! That said, the 4.2MB download number is just plain wrong. We're currently transferring 1.2Mb on a page load when caching is disabled (everything is gzipped), but the critical path contents (the HTML + CSS bundle) is 68.5kb and once that's loaded the page starts rendering.
The lunr.js index is very nifty - click the looking glass in the corner to try out the instant search. It's of course cached between page loads.
npm run build && npm run testYou can get all of this in 30 seconds on our free plan + instant cache invalidation, deploy previews (we'll give you a unique preview url for every pull request), atomic deploys and no issues with deleting files :)
If they only scrub half of that traffic, you're still getting a massive DDoS attack against your origin servers anyway. And the frustrating thing about buying DDoS mitigation is that you have absolutely no way of knowing how much traffic any DDoS mitigation service can actually scrub of a given attack before it hits you...
NS1 has been an awesome partner in this and we're really excited about being able to hook the DNS records for peoples custom domains directly into our advanced traffic director to offer the best possible global performance.
Happy to answer any questions!
Whether people gets downvoted or upvoted for it depends on whether readers see the comment as legitimate and relevant or as spam...
[Disclaimer, I'm one of the founders]
1. During development. Having instant builds running whenever you save is great for the development experience
2. For really large sites. Being able to build many thousand pages in about a minute instead of 20 minutes or way more is a huge difference for the authoring experience.
https://performance.sucuri.net/domain/varvy.com
Hosting on a single VPS is never gonna be very fast globally no matter what you pay your hosting. In fact our free plan on netlify would make this a whole lot faster...
The people that pay for the $49/$349 or $1000 are typically clients with projects that are not simple "static sites". Typically these sites includes content management and requires a build to run everytime and editor triggers a change. They're often .com's for companies that always ends up needing proxying because they have legacy apps behind different URL
Other clients have in-house dev teams and run their main web application on Netlify with constant updates in different branches and pull requests, and Netlify lets them collabarote across these.
Again others just have large global presences and care about having someone to escalate to if there's a problem with a launch, any uptime, certificate, configuration issue or the like.
Those are the one that needs and use our Pro/Global/Enterprise tiers.
https://www.netlify.com/blog/2015/03/06/comparing-netlify-an...
You're completely forgetting Continuous deployment in your comparison, which is a pretty big part of the modern static workflow. This includes things like pushing branches to different URLs, having a way to previewing pull requests, caching dependencies between runs, etc, etc... It's a huge part of our service.
Apart from that, if you ever work with static publishing and a CDN, and actually tried making the CDN cache your HTML assets, you'll instantly run into problems with instant cache invalidation and atomic deploys. You'll never run into these issues with netlify.
Rollbacks are possible with git, but previewing any version you've any deployed at any time are not something you can do.
Even basic things, like getting both your naked domain and the wwww domain to work correctly will often take developer time on that platform (how much do you bill your time at? Hopefully more than $49/month).
As for cost - our free plan is super generous and cover pretty much every thing you'll get with the alternative setup you mention. And for personal projects or open source projects we even give away our Pro plan for free!
The people that pay for our plans are typically not developers but their clients or employers who care about the best performance, highest uptime, and fastest speed of development.
We do continuous deployment with deep git integration that'll create unique preview URLs for each pull request, making it awesome to collaborate on single page apps or content driven websites.
In general you'll find a very deep feature set that's making it possible to take this approach to building sites all the way from simple prototypes to running, maintaining and serving huge projects.
Surge is a simple tool with a really awesome CLI for deploying static sites quickly.
At netlify we're building a larger platform for working with a modern static approach.
We have an integrated continuous deployment platform. That way you just link a git repository to netlify, and we'll do the build whenever you push to git and even give you preview deploys of pull requests.
We run our own content delivery network, which means a lot for performance, and can post-process assets to automatically serve them out of a larger asset CDN with far future expires headers.
Netlify has built in Let's Encrypt support with a 1 click setup. We'll do automatic certificate rotation and enable HTTP2 when HTTPS is turned on.
Our CDN can handle complex proxying and redirect rules. If part of your site need to go to a dynamic backend or if you need API proxying, a one-line rule can set this up. We can even handle gradual migrations from a dynamic to a static approach by proxying all non-static requests straight from the CDN to a dynamic origin.
Apart from that we have lots of extra features like built-in pre-rendering for single page apps, Geo IP based redirect and rewrite rules, JavaScript snippet injection for easy analytics setup, form processing, etc, etc...
It's like GitHub pages on steroids and includes free Let's Encrypt based SSL for custom domains, can run builds from your GitHub repo with any static site generator, supports rewrite/redirect rules/proxying/form processing/password protection and much more...
I wrote a post with all the details around why it's best to use www and why naked domains can be really bad for performance and uptime:
https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/01/12/ddos-attacks-and-dns...
I've used both Squid, varnish and nginx plenty, but traffic server beat them in our benchmarks and the built in ssl termination + plugin api makes it extremely powerful...
Internet explorer on windows XP and Android 2.3 doesn't support SNI based ssl and our full ssl solution assures that even these older browsers can access the site over https without any warnings...
If you just look at some product that's gotten investment and think "why would they invest in that?", you're thinking about it wrong.
The entrepreneur that's been out raising that round has been out pitching a vision for a large billion dollar business, with that product as just one of the initial steps on the road to getting there.
To raise money from investors, you'll need to on the one hand present a vision for a large business like that, a clear road-map to getting there and sufficient proof to convince them that you and your co-founders are capable of executing on that vision and that road map.
Sometimes you prove this with a working product and traction around it, sometimes you can prove it because of a stellar background (having done it before) and sometimes you prove it because you're pitching to people who already know you very well and believe in you.