
Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z - gk1
https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/08/09/netlify-raises-12m-from-a16z/
======
alberth
I've never understood Netlify.

They are supposed to be targeted at static high performance blogs.

Yet their own blog is 15MB in size and over 100 different http requests.

See the YSlow report for their blog site below.

[https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.netlify.com/C6fG3uTg](https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.netlify.com/C6fG3uTg)

It receives an "F" rating.

Isn't this kind of bloated website the exact problem Netlify is suppose to
solve?

~~~
mipmap04
To be fair, 14.4MB of that is images (I don't know why some of them are that
large, however). Does their offering specifically have something related to
image optimization / scaling (I'm unfamiliar with Netlify)?

~~~
_fool
disclaimer: I work for netlify.

We do have image optimization built-in but it won't change images' size (in
case you link externally - we don't want to move your cheese) or do anything
lossy.

So - we have not resized and chosen optimal formats for those images and we
are working on doing it right now :)

~~~
alberth
Please note I am truly rooting for you guys to make the web a better place.

But it's not just the blog I linked to above that's slow, it's even the blog
post of this very HN post.

[https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.netlify.com/KdCXA8bB](https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.netlify.com/KdCXA8bB)

54 http request (26 of which are JS) just seems kind of nuts for a blog post.

Not trying to make you guys look bad.

But clearly asset merging and image optimization are needed.

~~~
goshx
Honestly curious, was it slow on your browser? The entire website is
ridiculously fast for me.

~~~
crazypyro
You mentioning this made me go and check it out myself and I got to say the
page loads are very quick to the natural eye on my connection, FWIW. I would
recommend other people check it out themselves as well.

I compared it to apple.com (since someone mentioned it in a lower comment) and
apple.com had noticeable page loads whereas Netlify's blog didn't.

------
Scorpiion
Interesting to see the changes of their product packaging (and price) over
time:

1\.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20141020025157/https://www.netli...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141020025157/https://www.netlify.com/pricing/)

2\.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160505192926/https://www.netli...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160505192926/https://www.netlify.com/pricing/)

3\.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170221195249/https://www.netli...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170221195249/https://www.netlify.com/pricing/)

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

The model of charging per site was removed in [4], the "low tier" $9 per site
was also removed, maybe it was not differentiated enough from the free version
to be worth the effort. It also seems they introduced "paying per user" in
between [3] and [4], maybe that was a form of substitute for the removal of
the site limit.

Disclosure: I am a founder of a cloud hosting startup called Sourcevoid,
that's in part why I think looking at pricing and packaging of hosting
services is interesting, but thought others might like seeing the links above
as well.

------
at-fates-hands
Netlify is really good for static sites, but you can also combine their static
site resources with Flatmarket or Snipcart and create ecommerce sites as well.

I'd suggest checking out their blog
([https://www.netlify.com/blogs/](https://www.netlify.com/blogs/)), they have
a ton of tutorials on the multiple static site generators they support

[https://www.netlify.com/tags/tutorial/](https://www.netlify.com/tags/tutorial/)

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tal_berzniz
Awesome service so far. The Continuous Deployment flow is awesome with deploy
previews, CDN, custom routing, Automatic SSL from Let's Encrypt. The SSL can
be improved to be true automatic without a provisioning step (first hit issues
a cert)

~~~
gk1
I mean... It takes just one click to get the SSL. That is already far easier
than I've seen from any other service.

~~~
tal_berzniz
It can be easier. We've used [https://github.com/GUI/lua-resty-auto-
ssl](https://github.com/GUI/lua-resty-auto-ssl) to provide SSL provisioning on
the fly at my previous company for our customers` custom domains. This also
means that there is no downtime at all when they change the DNS record from
their old servers to the new one

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calcsam
Static sites are becoming more and more popular -- you can host them on CDNs
across the globe, they can be cached client-side, pre-loaded, work offline....

Especially important thinking about the billions of people in developing
countries accessing the Internet over 2G connections.

If the trend towards static sites continues, Netlify could be the next Heroku.

Personally, I use Netlify to host my Gatsby blog; all I need to do is `git
push` and they handle the rest.

~~~
jbob2000
You can use heroku for static sites and it already is that easy (well,
kinda... git push heroku master)

~~~
michaelmior
You definitely can, but it's not designed or optimized for static sites. And I
think there's plenty you can do to improve performance when an app server
isn't needed.

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paulgb
I moved some static sites to Netlify from S3 because it seemed easier than
getting HTTPS working on S3. It certainly was, and I haven't looked back. The
automatic generation of a static site from the repo is a killer feature I
didn't know I needed until I tried it.

Congrats to the team!

~~~
ledgerdev
Yeah, I loved them too really great service that is forward thinking. They
work great for large apps or corporate sites, but for small/personal sites
their pricing model doesn't work so well, which I can understand.

For instance I needed simple http auth on some directories in a site, and to
get that it's $45/month. I ended up with caddy on a $5 digital ocean droplet
which automatically sets up and renews the lets encrypt SSL for you. Caddy
really is pretty damn nice.

~~~
bobfunk
For small/personal sites the pricing model is "Free". I think that tends to
work well :)

~~~
ledgerdev
Not so much when you need a feature not included in free. And free is always
subject to change.

~~~
bobfunk
The features not included in free are not typically things you can't do
without for personal projects (ie, password protection, role based access
control, role management for team members, etc...)

~~~
ledgerdev
Password protection is a pretty basic need and need not cost $45/month. Of
course the role/team based stuff for $45/month makes perfect sense because
those are only applicable on larger projects.

~~~
michaelmior
I've never found a need for password protection on any of the small personal
projects I've worked on. But I guess I could imagine some use cases where that
would be nice to have.

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magic_beans
Netlify is _amazing_. It is so easy, a pleasure to use for static sites and
react apps, continuous deployment is _awesome_ , and open source projects are
(for now and hopefully for the long run!) FREE.

Huge, huge fangirl. Keep it up, Netlify!!!

------
miles_matthias
Way to go Netlify. I've been a customer since BitBalloon and this team does
great work in a trend that I'm really glad to see.

Edit: a downvote? Really?

~~~
riffic
HN moderation is notoriously downvote happy. Bite the bullet and move on.

------
dkonieczek

      Join the conversation on Hacker News
    

Just FYI, this is linking to post submission

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sandGorgon
We use netlify for quite sometime with Hugo and we loved it.

Today, we use firebase hosting which is significantly cheaper and comes with
its own CDN and free Google SSL. But I don't get CI from my git repo - I have
to compile and push. Which I personally prefer.

But kudos to Netlify - I hope they realise that the value is not in CDN or CI
or ssl certificates . But rather in building a CMS for static websites.

~~~
bobfunk
Have you checked the pricing recently? I think it's likely to have changed
quite dramatically since after you switched to Firebase.

~~~
sandGorgon
Well the first priced tier is 45$ per month. It's many times what we end up
paying to firebase.

Not that I'm saying it's a bad deal - it's great for people on WordPress or
Drupal.

~~~
_fool
Do you need any paid features? The only things you get for $45 are:

\- simple password protection (basic auth or single-password-no-login)

\- small division of power - not _everyone_ can delete the site and invite
contributors.

Everything else is included for free.

------
deepakkarki
Awesome! Great to hear. I've pretty much automated my startup (
[https://discoverdev.io](https://discoverdev.io) ) to work on their
infrastructure. And the best part is everything comfortably fits into the free
tier.

All the collection and curation happens in the backend (on my laptop), get
jinja to generate the data into a html and in a single command goes live! This
product has been a life saver. No monitoring, cacheing, or any other headache.

Virtual hi-fi to the people who make Netlify.

------
JBiserkov
Netlify also has HTTP 2 server push
[https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/07/18/http/2-server-
push-o...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/07/18/http/2-server-push-on-
netlify/)

And headers in general [https://www.netlify.com/docs/headers-and-basic-
auth/](https://www.netlify.com/docs/headers-and-basic-auth/)

Disclaimer: A very happy free customer

------
slackoverflower
Read that as Netflix the first time. Was confused since Netflix's valuation is
well past $50b+

~~~
overcast
Yeh, not a fan of the name, and not just for the obvious reason. I'm honestly
not even sure how to say it properly. There's too many syllables for such a
short name.

~~~
bobfunk
Think "simplify" but with "net" :)

~~~
ValentineC
Ah, I never thought about it that way until now.

In any case, I'm a huge fan of Netlify. Thanks for the service!

------
nodesocket
Seems like Netlify is the offspring if CloudFlare and Heroku had a child.

I am using Google Cloud Storage as my origin and CloudFlare for few corporate
static sites, and it works fantastic. Get CDN, http/2, free SSL, and cost is
literally cents.

Deployment is simple with the gsutil cli:

    
    
      // regex excludes dotfiles recursively
      gsutil rsync -R -x '^\/?(?:\w+\/)*(\.\w+)' directory-to-sync-here gs://bucket-here

------
prashnts
I love Netlify and how much they support open source projects (thanks!).
Hosting a quick mockup is very easy: drag-and-drop zip, done. It comes with
Lets Encrypt SSL, CDN, deploy preview and history.

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dotnetkow
Love love love Netlify! Moved my blog from Tumblr (lol - but it was free!) to
Netlify with Hugo as the static site generator. A wonderful experience. With
little effort, my blog now has SSL, auto-deploys after I git check-in, and is
a million times faster. I wrote a tiny bit about the migration process:
[https://www.netkow.com/moving-from-tumblr-to-hugo-
netlify/](https://www.netkow.com/moving-from-tumblr-to-hugo-netlify/)

------
curun1r
Awesome! Given the somewhat excessive egress prices charged by AWS/S3 and
GCP/Cloud Storage for sites hosted on those services, I've always considered
Netlify (and others with similar services) as the companion piece to
Lambda/Cloud Functions in the "how to go serverless and save money" playbook.
It's great to see them getting some VC love since it will make them an easier
sell in corporate environments.

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prophesi
I'm using their open-sourced Netlify-CMS for a static-site, and it's been
wonderful. If you also have the site hosted by Netlify, they streamline the
github push webhook for you that the CMS depends on, which is really nice when
you're starting out.

------
cies
I really like where Netlify is going and how they embrace open source to
achieve their goals. There's just one thing I miss in their mix: strong
typing. No Elm, PureScript or ReasonML (just yet).

~~~
bobfunk
Co-founder here - Thanks so much!

We do use Elm for a couple of minor projects ourself, and it works great on
our platform. We also have plenty of people using Typescript or Flow with
Netlify.

------
stevenhubertron
I'm a big user of Netlify, and host a number of sites with well over a million
views a year and they have been rock solid, quick builds, quick support. I
can't wait for them to take off!

------
dx034
Does anyone have details regarding their CDN? Competitors tend to give
information on their locations so that you can decide if it works for your
audience. Cloudflare even delivers information on the edge node in the header
to check where the closest one is.

Is there anything like this for netlify? Or any benchmarks on how they
generally perform vs. fastly and cloudflare?

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tjholowaychuk
I use Netlify as well, great service! From my quick tests their home-grown CDN
seems on par with CloudFront et al, hard to go wrong.

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djhworld
On the main page there's an interactive tutorial

$ npm install netlify -g /usr/local/bin/netlify ->
/usr/local/lib/node_modules/netlify-cli/bin/cli.js ├── left-pad@0.0.3 ├──
isarray@1.0.0 ├── is-positive-integer@1.1.1 ├── babel@6.5.2

I hope this was a joke because it made me laugh a lot

~~~
bobfunk
Sure is ;)

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jcsnv
This is interesting, I just tested it out and its pretty flawless.

For a standard React FE app, why use this vs Heroku vs S3?

~~~
guu
Netlify provides a global cdn and administrative features targeting statically
generated pages.

S3 is more generic in its goals so it doesn't provide either.

Heroku on the other hand can host server applications which Netlify cannot so
it is really a different service. You could host an API on heroku and the
react app on Netlify.

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k_sh
Wasn't aware of Netlify until now - the product looks great!

I think I'll try it out with some upcoming projects.

------
jmuguy
Just published my first application on Netlify yesterday. I looked at Surge.sh
but their pricing doesn't include the SSL certificate. Netlify SSL with Let's
Encrypt was literally a button press. Good stuff!

~~~
michaelmior
I used surge.sh for a while and I found they had significant downtime on
several occasions. Hasn't happened to me so far with Netlify.

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zbruhnke
Gitlab on-prem support coming? That would make me very likely to switch
especially because I think it would make it much easier to spin up review apps
for our SPA's

~~~
bobfunk
We do support GitLab on prem already, but right now it doesn't let you trigger
deploy previews and branch deploys. Currently that's something we can help
with on the custom plan, but we do hope to bring it to the normal tiers as
well.

~~~
zbruhnke
oh nice! thats a welcome change - seems like last time I looked wasnt even 6
months ago and it was not there yet - branch deploys would be one of my exact
use cases for sure

~~~
_fool
disclaimer: i work at Netlify.

ping us in support and I can talk you through the setup w/the private repo
(and branch deploys can be simulated with a few netlify sites attached to the
same repo - no additional cost for additional sites on any plan)

~~~
sytse
If we at GitLab can help please let us know.

------
drizze
Congrats! Hope they do great things with it. Use them to host a middleman site
and love the service.

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biot
Anything on the roadmap for supporting server-side (api, db, etc.) in the same
way?

~~~
marktangotango
There are a few things you can do from static sites; authorization services,
database as a service, backend as a service, etc. I find people find theses
things appealing in the abstract yet rarely build anything with them. I built
a dbaas that failed myself. For example, what dynamic functionality would you
like to add to your dynamic site?

~~~
biot
I'm thinking of explicitly non-static sites, enabling SaaS offerings. I'd like
to see the ease of use and functionality for static sites extended across the
full stack.

~~~
marktangotango
I'm working on something along these, lines. If you or anyone else is
interested in early access, please contact me (email in profile).

------
pbowyer
Congratulations to the founders and team - a great product and great service!

------
lww
Congratulations for a great round with a great team and an awesome future!

