
Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network - gk1
https://www.netlify.com/blog/2018/10/09/netlify-raises-30m-to-replace-webservers-with-a-global-application-delivery-network/
======
StavrosK
I use Netlify for all my static sites and it's been amazing. All I have to do
is push and they take care of everything else, I can't understate how much I
love the product. If you want to check out a live deployment, my website
[https://www.stavros.io/](https://www.stavros.io/) is on Netlify.

I especially like how they provide forms, lambdas and very easy testing by
just pushing to another git branch. I don't see why anyone would use
Github/Gitlab pages when Netlify exists.

~~~
xrd
Can you edit (say Jekyll blogs) on GitHub and them somehow push to Netlify
automatically?

This is critical for me since I edit using my Android Jekyll-optimized tool
Teddy Hyde
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.EditorHyde...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.EditorHyde.app)).

~~~
pm90
Have you tried using Github pages for that? Really easy to setup Jekyll blogs
there

~~~
biggestlou
Sure, but GitHub Pages is a relatively “dumb” host. You don’t get preview
builds, branch deploys, and lots of other things. It’s nice for a minimal
approach but for a large site with lots of people working on it I would not
recommend it.

------
pixelmonkey
May not be widely known, but a startup named Divshot launched what feels to me
now like an identical service to Netlify, just a few years earlier. Existed
~2012-2015. They were acquired by Google and their product was converted into
Firebase Hosting. I haven't tried it, though:

[https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/](https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/)

~~~
mbleigh
Founder of Divshot here, and engineering manager of the Firebase Hosting team.
Thanks for the shoutout! :)

~~~
MrLeap
Your co-founder is one of my favorite people, we were good friends in high-
school. I'm super proud of you guys whenever I see divshot mentioned. :)

------
herbst
So much praising so little talk about its limits. I consider myself to be
kinda stick in a Rails way of thinking. But most projects I touch heavily
depend on a backend, database, or raw computing power.

Everything that doesn't fall in those categories is something I create static
(ex nanoc.) i just build out locally push to my git and let a post-commit hook
do the Copy pasta. My static Web server runs without attention for 5 plus
years now.

I see it makes stuff easier, but i fail to see why it would be so much better
than any other git deployment method.

~~~
blairanderson
They're basically giving you:

\- the "static webserver"

\- the sandbox for commit hooks

\- instant CDN & cache-busting

\- 1-click domain setup

\- 1-click SSL setup

\- git-branch powered a/b testing

\- git-branch powered deploy previews

\- Functions-as-a-service deployment and routing

and that's the free tier

------
jypepin
Ok, I'm a web dev and I hate having to deal with web servers, configs, CI,
etc. The idea sounds great, but I can't understand how this works from this
post.

Can someone explain how this works exactly? Are they basically offering a way
to prebuild apps to static assets and host them on CDNs? How do server-side
only things will happen then?

~~~
petercooper
Think Heroku but just for deploying static assets. You can do something as
simple as have a git repo of assets, push it, and you're up and running with
SSL, etc, straight away.

How do you get dynamic? Well, they support a build process so static sites or
assets can be built at their end, if that's how you roll. But if you want
_fully_ dynamic sites, well, no, you can use their AWS Lambda-powered
functions service to help build this out, but you won't be deploying something
like a PHP or Rails app to Netlify :-) This limitation opens up a lot of other
opportunities to simplify deployment, however.

~~~
virgil_disgr4ce
Databases are, in general, the next obvious question for a dynamic app on
Netlify. Some solutions can use lambdas, but since a straight-up database is
always going to be necessary for certain things, it makes me wonder if they'd
roll out a paid database at some point... though that sort of conflicts with
their "JAM" "no backend! well somebody else's backend maybe?" selling point

~~~
freebs
Firebase Cloud Firestore is so nice and they've been working on it for a long
time, this would likely not be a good use of their time.

------
drawkbox
Not seeing any bandwidth, storage or other costs so I wonder what their
soft/hard limits are for those things. I see their forms have really low
limits for the price 1000 submissions and 1GB file upload limits, 2m functions
on the $45 plan [1].

[1] [https://www.netlify.com/pricing/](https://www.netlify.com/pricing/)

~~~
cupar
They can be found in the TOS (see Quota & Limits section)

[https://www.netlify.com/tos/](https://www.netlify.com/tos/)

~~~
drawkbox
Thanks, strange it is in the ToS.

For paid accounts:

\- Network bandwidth: 1TB/month - Soft

\- Storage: 1TB - Soft

\- API requests: 500 requests/minute, 3 deploys/minute* - Hard

For free accounts:

\- Network Bandwidth: 100GB/month - Soft

\- Storage: 100GB - Soft

\- API requests: 500 requests/minute, 3 deploys/minute* - Hard

I wonder if they do overages, or just a hard cut-off, no mention. They
probably nudge users that go over soft limits to the enterprise column.

~~~
_fool
I work for netlify, and yes, we ask you to upgrade, don't just turn you off if
you go over.

~~~
mkasu
My concern was that there is no clear upgrade path for static websites, if
running out of free bandwidth.

All per-site addons focus on different kinds of dynamic features (Forms,
Identity, Functions, ...) I suppose a Team account would work, but that also
seems like paying for unneeded features.

The support team just linked me to the pricing page.

------
tima101
Question to Netlify's founders. Did you really have to raise from VCs? Was the
company already profitable?

~~~
bobfunk
We started out bootstrapping and were profitable before our first round of
funding. However, we always strongly believed that the larger vision of what
we wanted to build would be impossible to achieve without outside funding.

~~~
asprouse
How did you decide when it was time to stop bootstrapping and raise a round?
Was there a magic number traction-wise (total users, MRR, etc) or was it
motivated by the desire to staff up a team and execute on your product vision?

------
mjsweet
One of the things I love about Netlify is that I have never asked my clients
to flush their cache after updating their sites... everything is invalidated
and refreshed almost by magic. I suddenly realised this after months of using
it, sometimes multiple pushes to live each day and it never skipped a beat, no
issues with clients getting edgy because their site hasn’t been updated or
because something doesn’t look right (css not refreshed but html has) etc.

It just works. Every time.

------
panda427
Built vote by mail website for Florida
([https://www.stampthevote.com](https://www.stampthevote.com)) using a single
JSON file with 1500 zip codes and Gatsby.js and deployed with Netlify.

Great to be in the future and not have to worry about hosting a server for
such a simple site.

~~~
tyingq
Nice work. I did see a small issue...you're getting the string "(undefined)"
in some of the page titles:

<title data-react-helmet="true">How to Vote in Clay County (undefined)</title>

~~~
panda427
Thank you

------
learc83
The pricing seems a bit weird. I'm dubious about hosting something semi-
important on the free tier, but the first paid price point is $45, which seems
too high for easier static hosting.

~~~
Wintamute
On the free tier you're just hosting static files on Netlify, so they can
cache very effectively. Also since you're just hosting a set of static files
you're hardly "locked in", so if for whatever reason the free tier stops being
appealing you can just move on to a different provider.

------
gorbypark
I've been tinkering with Netlify for a year or two now and have two production
sites on it for the last ~6 months, and it's amazing. If you have a site built
with Vue/React/Angular, there really is no reason to not use Netlify! I've
even been playing around with some API endpoints using Netlify Functions
(which is AWS Lambda) and it's pretty neat, you can develop the front end and
back end in the same repo and have it all automagically deploy with a git
push.

------
ballsyballsman
This is just marketing pitch. Could someone paste some technical architecture
on how this is done?

Also how you manage applications and data across different jurisdictions and
countries?

~~~
hamandcheese
It’s static hosting + CDN + ergonomic tooling.

------
Ajedi32
How is an "Application Delivery Network" different from a CDN (which AFAIK is
what Netlify currently is)? Netlify still only handles static content, right?

~~~
detaro
They run the buildprocess for your static content for you, and have a
functions as a service thing integrated, which I think wraps Amazon Lambda.

------
mkrecny
How does this compare to zeit (zeit.world)? I notice they support functions
and identity.

------
awill
Netlify is great. I have 5 sites there. All for free. My only concern is that
it's too good to be true. I hope nothing changes for the worse (i.e. they get
bought and cripple the free tier).

~~~
securityfreak
I knew nothing about Netlify before this post, so this is a purely generic,
rational note: yes it will. You lure in customers with an attractive free tier
and then change it so you can monetize at least some of them and be
profitable. Choosing the right business model however, is what I think shows
the true character of the company’s leadership. Unfortunately greed usually
wins. But enjoy the product while it lasts. Might be a good amount of months,
or even years before that happens.

~~~
thirdsun
On a sidenote: Please be aware that they didn't start free - I used them
before their current pricing tiers and happily paid about about 25 € for their
entry- or mid-level tier. Sometime after the new plans kicked in, I realized
that I'd loose absolutely nothign by downgrading to the free plan.

It still sounds to good to be true, but I just wanted to point out that they
charged for their service when they were much smaller.

------
desireco42
Netlify is fantastic. It simplifies deployment and delivery of the websites
dramatically. What Heroku did for app development, they did for websites. And
even though they are nominally static websites, you can wire them with React
or Vue and still have apps.

They make my life easy.

~~~
benmanns
Agreed. I've switched out my complicated GitHub+S3+CloudFront+Cloudflare for
static hosting to Netlify. Netlify also handles some of the stuff you don't
even think about - e.g. partial deploy failure. With my past scripts I might
push `index.html`, lose network, error out, etc, and not push the updated
`assets/blah.css`.

They also have Functions
[https://www.netlify.com/features/functions/](https://www.netlify.com/features/functions/)
for dynamic content, but I haven't worked with those, yet.

~~~
lowry
Neither of you explained in layman terms what they actually do.

~~~
oddevan
They're a static site web host. You deploy using git, and they handle pulling
your site from git and deploying it to a CDN. If you're using a static site
engine like Hugo or Jekyll, they'll build the site for you as well.

I think what people are excited about is deploying a JavaScript-based frontend
(probably written in React or Vue.js) using Netlify, so the client-side code
is quickly distributed and accessible.

~~~
ipsun4
Building Javascript-based frontends are already compiling to static assets,
which Netlify could already host. JAMstack is about having the javascript
front-end call APIs on the backend. This is about creating an environment for
all the back-end functions to be in one place, possibly with the front-end
deployment. Not sure how it is going to be implemented though.

------
matt2000
I don't quite get this. I'm a long time Heroku user and this seems to be much
more limited and not much better in any dimension, why is this so popular?

This is an honest question, I just don't quite get why there's so much
excitement in the comments.

Thanks!

~~~
andrei_says_
Many brochureware websites can be deployed as static sites.

There are many sophisticated static site generators which allow creating and
maintaining large complex sites.

There are static site generator CMS apps which provide viable front-ends so
that non-technical people can manage content. See netlify CMS.

All content is kept in git with all benefits derived from it.

Netlify hosting is free, simple to set up, secure by default, and provides
lightning fast access in a “set it and forget it” manner.

To update your site, push to your github/gitlab/bitbucket repo. To create a
preview of changes, push to a branch.

Form processing, logins etc. are inexpensive easy to set up add-ons.

Static websites are a magnitude faster, less hack-able and worry-free.

It’s a really sweet spot.

Heroku could be used for this but the free tier is limited.

------
moeamaya
I have a few popular HN-launched static sites on Netlify including
[https://servicelist.io/](https://servicelist.io/). Not only do they provide a
seamless hosting and CDN (cache-expiring) experience but they also have a
wonderful multi-user CMS that eliminates about half of my Rails sites!

I'll reiterate a few other sentiments in this thread, it feels a bit too good
to be true. Even with 300k monthly traffic, not paying a dime seems like a
precarious situation to be in for a free service.

~~~
blocked_again
Is 300k monthly traffic even a big deal when all you are doing is serving
static files?

~~~
moeamaya
With images it can definitely add up. On S3 + Cloudfront, I was paying about
$85/mo for coolbackgrounds.io

------
danr4
I'm in love with Netlify. The product is spot on. The support team is fast and
knowledgeable. Things are simple and they just work, and it doesn't feel like
it's holding you back.

------
jhabdas
It's been a year since I last spoke with Netlify staff [^1]. They weren't
super keen on the arguments I raised against using their service given you can
host Websites that load in 100-200ms on S3 with CloudFront for pennies a
month. If course S3 isn't as push-button as Netlify but it's certainly much
more extensible and will probably be around longer.

[^1]: [https://habd.as/zero-to-http-2-aws-hugo/](https://habd.as/zero-to-
http-2-aws-hugo/)

~~~
mr_toad
Can you push straight to S3 from git? I know you can wire up S3 sync with
commit hooks or something similar, but that’s more work.

------
JBiserkov
Also they developed a CMS: [https://github.com/netlify/netlify-
cms](https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms)

------
tobilg
I love Netlify! In my opinion, it’s not „just“ a great way to host static
sites, but also probably the easiest (and cheapest) way to get started with
functions as a service/serverless.

You don‘t need your own AWS account to use Lambda functions.

I compiled a landing page example with Mailchimp mailing list signup a while
ago:

[https://github.com/tobilg/netlify-functions-
landingpage](https://github.com/tobilg/netlify-functions-landingpage)

------
alexcabrera
Our studio, Marquee
([https://www.marquee.studio](https://www.marquee.studio)), has an in-house
publishing platform called Proof
([https://www.proof.pub](https://www.proof.pub)) that we started back in 2012
which couples fully customizable editorial tools and content model, a headless
CMS, and React/Serverless based SDK to compile static websites specifically
for editorial and content marketing teams. An example that was designed by our
team and managed through Proof that HN is probably familiar with is The First
Round Review ([http://firstround.com/review/](http://firstround.com/review/)).

It's a similar approach that Netlify has put together and works great. Can't
advocate for it strongly enough.

------
xrd
Having spent the last few days trying to get Cloudfront with Lambda@Edge
working, I'm excited to see this. Cloudfront is a mess and clearly Lambda@Edge
is "cutting edge" at AWS (where cutting edge means "full of bugs")

~~~
zackbloom
You might want to try Cloudflare Workers instead. (disclaimer: I work at
Cloudflare)

~~~
xrd
I assumed they were for service workers with SPAs. Not the case? The AWS
landscape is so massive it's hard to understand what everything does. I'll
check out CloudFlare workers, thank you.

~~~
xrd
Funny, I keep getting confused between _CloudFront_ and _CloudFlare_ and
assumed this was another AWS product but it obviously isn't.

Do workers somehow operate inside your AWS stack via distributions of
CloudFront? If not, that's probably not going to work, we have so much in S3,
etc.

But, if that assumption is incorrect, can you point me to a document that
suggests a transition path?

~~~
zackbloom
Cloudflare is actually a totally different company, yes! Here is more info
about Workers:
[https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/)

------
yannovitch
Netlify has been very tempting these last years, and it looks like they're
constantly upping their game, but still, I think will pass.

Why ? Because it's a US company. I am trying very hard to give the least data
I can to companies under the Patriot Act, and by subscribing to Netlify, which
afaik have their main datacenter in the US, I would be "offering" it all my
most precious content. So even if it is more work, I will host my static
websites on my personal Gitlab instance (which has lots of workers based on
Docker to automatically deploy your Hugo/Jekyll/... website).

Or do you think I am being too paranoid ?

------
jpincheira
These guys are absolutely great. Well deserve and super glad they will be able
to keep growing.

We're running Standups.io frontend ReactJS app with them, and for $0 / mo,
which sounds nuts. Sometimes I wish they'd even charge us.

------
tome
This may be a naive question, but how many websites are actually static these
days?

~~~
pixelrevision
Not a ton. But the idea here is you use javascript to call an API for your
dynamic content. This way your javascript/css/images are all setup on a CDN
that you don't have to manage.

~~~
manigandham
But where does the API come from? Dynamic content needs don't go away with
static sites and usually it's yet another service to worry about.

~~~
brbcoding
In our case, we moved a blog from WP to a static Gatsby.js site. It's hosted
on Netlify and all content is driven by Contentful where updates trigger a
webhook on Netlify to rebuild the blog (new posts are pulled during this build
process).

~~~
manigandham
So now you're using 2 different services to host a site, instead of just using
hosted Wordpress (or squarespace, wix, etc). Does Contentful provide the same
content editing experience? What are the advantages here?

~~~
fvdessen
The advantage is that the resulting website being just static pages will be
much faster and secure that your hosted wordpress. And compared to wix etc,
you have a lot more control on the appearance and structure of your website,
because you can use wathever static website builder you choose

~~~
manigandham
How is it more secure when you're still accessing an API? Wordpress itself
might not be the best product but other fully-hosted services are all the
same, whether they render the site or just give you an API.

A CDN is equally fast when the content is cached, and if you're building the
entire site as static pages then it's not really a dynamic site in the first
place and can also be done with HTML or markdown in the same repo.

The fine control seems the be the only real advantage, at the cost of more
moving pieces.

~~~
theNextEpisode
Good luck getting content editors to commit code to a repo or in markdowns.
The contentful + netlify setup is really elegant.

~~~
manigandham
If you're using Contentful then how is that different or better than wordpress
or any hosted system that is made for writing posts?

The only 2 advantages of splitting this into separate systems is extra
customization (even though hosted solutions are already very flexible) and
compiling the entire site into static files. The 2nd seems to be more of a
thing for devs to enjoy rather than something that makes a real difference to
users, especially when you're already using a CDN.

------
calcsam
Well-deserved -- congrats to Chris, Matt and the whole Netlify team!

------
philsnow
Does Netlify support 2FA for paid tiers? Their settings page is really clear
about some features being available in certain plans (and btw I love this,
it's really clear and it's not very aggressive of an upsell / not obnoxious),
but there is no such callout for 2FA.

This is one critical feature that github pages has over Netlify. Github's 2FA
is really nice, actually; you can add multiple U2F keys and you can also use
TOTP and/or SMS if you want, all at the same time.

~~~
_fool
I work for netlify. We support 2FA on any tier, since you can auth via git
provider and require 2FA there.

We presently don't support REQUIRED 2FA (you can also set a password) under
the enterprise account level, since that's what enables SSO using a SAML-based
identity provider and enforcing those limits there.

~~~
philsnow
Thanks for the answer from a direct source :)

A core part of Netlify's offering (any SaaS's offering really) is some kind of
guarantee that attackers can't get in and vandalize users' sites. When you
delegate authentication to an identity provider (whether that's through
OAuth2/OIDC or SAML), you're delegating that core feature to a third party.
You've assuredly gone through the due diligence of asking them how they manage
their own security and authentication, but it's still something that you don't
control.

Facebook, one of the most valuable public companies in the world, recently
reported a breach where they had to reset any "log in with Facebook"
authentications for millions of users. Github has roughly two orders of
magnitude fewer employees than Facebook.

Anyway in case you have an internal feature request for U2F on "email" logins,
please consider this an external "+1" for it.

------
mi_lk
Could someone enlighten me how does Netlify differ from Github pages? If I
want to put up a static website, what's the advantage of using Netlify over
Github pages?

~~~
waivek
I use Github pages. I'm not a professional web developer so my take is pretty
non technical.

The main difference for me seems to be netlify let's you have input forms and
do POST requests whereas github pages is more static and only serves static
pages via GET.

------
acdanger
I've started using Netlify for a lot of my freelance work which lately is
mostly static sites. It's been a real treat using it from all aspects. I
almost wish their lowest paid tier wasn't so high as I gladly fork over some
dollars.

Recent site I built hosted on Netlify:
[https://www.magnoliasmill.com](https://www.magnoliasmill.com)

------
thetaclear
Sorry if this is a little offtopic but I use pfSense DNS Resolver (1.1.1.1
over TLS) with DNSSEC support and every Netlify page I check fails on DNSSEC.
Is this a problem on my side or is the Netlify DNSSEC configuration wrong? It
seems like CNAME records at the domain root might be the problem.

------
JBiserkov
Netlify doesn't even require Git - you can just zip some static files and drop
it in their uploader.

------
heywot
I've been looking for a service like this and I'm really interested. Too bad
the site is choking a bit on extra traffic right now. I'll have to check back
later.

------
yannovitch
By the way, does someone know if Netlify offer their webserver code with an
open source license ? I can't find such a repository on their github profile
...

------
tyingq
I wonder if Cloudflare has plans to compete in this space. If they added it to
the $20/month plan, it might push more conversion from the free plan.

~~~
StavrosK
I asked them once, and they seemed pretty adamant about not hosting content.
Then again, with the IPFS gateway they just added, you can pretty easily do
that.

~~~
tyingq
Their (newish) cache API, and worker-kv API seem to be all the foundation you
would need.

Basically, it feels like they would need to make a nice UI and perhaps some
connectors for github, etc.

------
ybv
Netlify has been a great help in building
[https://localgov.fyi/](https://localgov.fyi/) Kudos!

------
rkagerer
The documentation says it supports NodeJS, Ruby and Python for static site
generation. Any other languages/tools supported?

------
adamiscool8
Maybe I've just reached curmudgeon age, but how exactly is this an improvement
on: FTP to server, upload files?

~~~
chvid
I suppose you get a cdn and easier configuration (?) of ssl.

Now the question is do I need a cdn to host my blog made of static files? No.
But I will take it if it is free.

------
h43k3r
Any tips on moving a Node.js based Ghost blog to Netlify. I am open to moving
to static blog generators.

------
xmly
it is like firebase?

------
patrickg_zill
Imagine that I set up/rent a server with apache or nginx pre-configured for
mass virtual hosting.

For instance, servicea.org and service.org are placed into two separate
directories with the same names, respectively. As soon as web pages are
uploaded the pages are served.

What is the difference between that method and Netlify, aside from the forms
function?

~~~
mr_toad
The CDN, and the fact that your server is a single point of failure.

------
the_other_guy
>“This is where the web is going,” commented Chris Coyier, CSS expert

are you kidding me?

~~~
kaishiro
About which part?

~~~
the_other_guy
CSS """expert"""

~~~
kaishiro
Chris Coyier is pretty well known in the front end community. He created CSS-
Tricks and co-founded CodePen. If anyone can claim to be an expert it's him.
But if you're just trying to have a laugh at CSS - well, that's fine too I
guess.

~~~
the_other_guy
I didn't mean to belittle they guy at all, but the title "CSS expert" looks
ironic to me, just like "SEO expert"

~~~
danr4
What's so wrong with an "Expert" title suffix?

------
browsercoin
i dont get why i should use netlify over aws? what is the advantage here, i
might give it a try.

~~~
mr_toad
What part or AWS? Lightsail? S3 pages? Cloudfront? Lambda?

~~~
browsercoin
you can do it with cloudformation, although the SSL stuff might need
automation but nothing impossible.

where does netlify host my site? with git hooks you can trigger CI and
automation on AWS, perhaps even AWS SWF

------
kolderman
Replace y with x and shuffle some letters and you have Netflix.

~~~
ukyrgf
Did I type "netfl" and hit enter a million times the first few months I used
it? Probably.

------
jhu247
Netlify has a free plan for hosting personal sites. Though I could do things
manually, the continuous integration, free SSL, and Hugo integration make
deploying my personal site as easy as anything I've ever seen.

Plug for my site: [https://www.joshuahu.io/](https://www.joshuahu.io/)

