Yeah, you are right about the vendor lock-ins. I’m more worried about the effort involved in case I need to migrate away. For static sites I’ve got two alternatives pretty much ready to go in case. Just my nature as a developer.
It makes more sense to have Netlify features on top of a main cloud provider like AWS.
Netlify features are great but it can really expensive as you move up the tiers
AWS is a lot cheaper but it takes more time and requires technical skills to deploy websites.
So i decided to build an open source netlify that works on top of your own AWS account. It requieres zero configuration and takes less than 2 minutes to install and deploy a full production website with 99.99% SLA free (costs $1500/month in Netlify) and HTTPS/SSL.
You can check out the tool 
arjan.tools/deploy.html
I hope it saves you time and money just like it did for me.
Hi @spek,
Sure, the link to Github is www.github.com/torus-tools
We just changed the the name from Arjan to Torus Tools, thats why the link is broken, and are re launchin this friday with new features. Let me know if you have any question I’m happy to assist you.
Hey @lucaskardo
interesting idea - Netlify has a lot of fans for it’s simplicity. If you can hook into this and deliver the cost savings at the same time you got an interesting project.
Some small feedback:
-
I would make the site more ‘light’. The dark theme isn’t for everyone. I would also either stick to the dog or cat (cat is more cute IMHO
). -
Otherwise, I would keep the naming consistent to make orientation easier:
(Btw: - (dash) instead of _ (underscore) work better for repo names)
-
I would show example on how to do stuff like on the TailwindCSS.com or mailgun homepage. After all, your tools are for developers and should reflect this in the website.
Great work, just some thoughts to make it even better 
Cheers,
Peter
Peter, thank you very much for taking your time to look at the project. All your feedback is right on.
Do you have a twitter we can connect?
We are releasing this week major updates and will like to keep you updated.
thanks again! You are great!
Netlify is great for static hosting.
I actually did a static hosting benchmark a couple of months ago. My static blog is actually hosted on Netlify.
There are other options to consider in this space though:
- Vercel offers much more bandwidth per month (1TB vs 100GB in Netlify)
- Firebase
Something I found really lacking with Netlfy was their analytics. You pay $9 per month and you get super limited information. Not worth it IMO.
Have you considered setting up your own simple analytics? I’ve just set myself a umami.is instance and it’s really neat.
Yeah I considered it.
Too much of a hassle for a low traffic blog to be honest
I’m working on my own blogging platform which will have its own server side analytics so I can wait a couple of months until that’s working.
Ah okay. It took me around 10 minutes on my existing hosting system (with a dedicated VPS). I wrote a blog article about it (currently in proof-reading). If you’re interested I can share it with you.
Own blogging platform? That sounds like a lot work. Have you checked all the CMS’ and static generators which already exist?
Yeah but a VPS costs money and maintaining.
It is indeed a lot of work.
CMS (Wordpress, etc) have many issues and don’t really work for everyone. For instance, you need to setup your hosting, CDN, caching plugin, etc. Good hosting is expensive (eg: Kinsta, WP Engine, etc). Most templates you find around are super bloated. And don’t get me started on security issues, updates, etc.
I’ve been using Jekyll and other SSGs for years. My current blog is using Eleventy. As a dev I prefer those to using a CMS but for non-tech people these are a no-go. Even something like Netlify CMS requires a complicated setup.
If you just want to publish without any hassle neither of those approaches are great. This is why Medium and Substack have become so popular these past years. You just write and click publish. But these have their own issues and I think I can carve a niche for what I’m building.
Sure, setting up a VPS for Umami costs - time plus around 3 USD per month. As I manage quite a few servers this one doesn’t really make any new problems… You could also host it serverless - works too.
Totally with you on this. Most CMS aren’t too big for the purpose. The only one I’m still using (besides static hosting) is SilverStripe. But that’s also due to professional stuff.
I found Jekyll not right for me. Eleventy is more my thing - running two sites on it atm. My blog and a browser extension development blog. I don’t use Netlify CMS as I find it a waste of time - I’m faster with sublime and git directly. But I’ve integrated it for others to enable them using static publishing - took less than 30 minutes in most cases.
Yeah, no effort platforms are a great idea. The no-stress publishing solution here could be Hashnode blogs. You can just publish and add your own domain to the blog. You can also have your own newsletter and subscribers. Plus all your posts are also published on hashnode and you get comments, followers etc. from there. Works pretty well and I see them popping up more and more.
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Great points all around @spek .
I was writing an answer but since this thread is about Netlify I think we’ve already gone too off topic
If there is interest in discussing blogging platforms we could start a new thread…
haha, indeed. It went off topic a bit. Sure, if you keen to discuss blogging or more general publishing platforms. Want to open one and tag me?