January 6th, 2021
Hello everyone, today I’ll be talking about why Netlify is my go-to choice for most deployment cases.
Today’s post will be pure text-based basically, and I might put some tutorial posts about different services of Netlify in the future. Since this is the case for this post I’ll now offer you a tl;dr option that pretty much answers the question on the topic: Hosting, serverless functions, continuous development, and enormous free tier.
Most people are using the word “Hosting Provider” while describing Netlify, even though the hosting options of Netlify is great, I find that description extremely incomplete. I can describe Netlify as a web development platform with many “modern” solutions to the needs of a “modern” developer.
What do I mean by that? I mean Netlify can offer many features that might not even come to your mind when you name your needs as a web developer on the top of your mind :) and does most of them seamlessly.
I’ll now walk you through “some” of its features/services that I like the most.
I haven’t checked the stats but I’m pretty sure that most, especially small, Netlify users are using it because it has a fantastic free tier for hosting static websites. Actually, most hosting providers like Netlify are providing some free options now, but given the features that I’m about to name below, Netlify is just a no brainer for most user types.
Deploys are overall so fast and easy in Netlify. You can go ahead on your main page, drag n drop a static web page into deployment zone and it’ll be online not in minutes but seconds, often before I even go to the deploy logs page.
It’s also quite easy to connect your account with Github, after you point out your build settings, .env variables whatever is needed properly with a friendly GUI you are good to go with your mini continuous development system for free. All the mentioned steps are also available over both Gitlab and Bitbucket.
Netlify has its own serverless features and they are quite easy to work with. Since the platform is getting more and more popular each day learning resources are also quite a few for the serverless netlify application.
That’s one of the unique features that most providers with a free tier doesn’t provide for free. All the websites that you are hosting on Netlify are being protected with a free SSL certificate.
Again, unlike many free hosting options Netlify gives a choice to use for changing the randomly generated subdomain for the hosted website with something custom without any restrictions.
Even though I mentioned free features with a premium feeling above quite often, I should also mention the extent of them. I won’t state any numbers about the allowed bandwidth, a number of builds and etc. I should say that it’s quite impossible to reach its limits with everyday use and prototyping.
Bonus: Even though I never used it I know Netlify is providing a headless CMS solution now, feedbacks are quite all right but I’ve never used it myself.
If I haven’t forgotten to write anything, those features are the ones that I love the most on Netlify and I’m thinking to move to another platform for those needs any time soon.
Some other popular competitors of Netlify are, Github pages, Gitlab pages, some Amazon products( I forgot their names ), and on the CMS part; Contentful, Episerver, and GraphSMC, and so on so forth.
Today’s post a little bit short and I might have missed some important features but I tried to explain what I use on Netlify as briefly as possible. In the future I’m planning to do some tutorials about several features I stated above.
Until then, take care of yourselves. I’ll see you in the next post.