New comment by seanwilson in "Netlify Dev"

> But you get free static sites through GitHub, nearly free static sites on Amazon S3.

I've been really happy using Netlify (with Jekyll) for https://www.checkbot.io/ - I didn't have to think about server admin at all when I got traffic spikes from Hacker News and Product Hunt traffic, and development features make working on the website really straightforward.

Features I like:

- Git based deploys automatically when you make a commit

- Git based rollbacks if there's a problem with the latest commit

- non-master Git branches are automatically deployed for preview

- automatic CDN + HTTPS setup

- no servers to admin i.e. they deal with security, scaling and configuration for you

- they do instant cache invalidation of images/CSS/JS files for you so there's no stale files being served after deploys

- before deploying you can run complex build scripts on Netlify to generate files to be deployed e.g. any static site generator you want to use, run arbitrary NPM scripts, you can download data that to be rendered on to a page

- you can use Netlify CMS as a friendly web interface to edit blog posts, articles and FAQs. It's easy enough for non-technical people so it's possible to use for standard business websites that would normally require something more complex to admin like WordPress.

You can cobble together something like the above yourself but Netlify makes it simple and robust so you can get on with more important things.

People that say you can do something similar with e.g. a Digital Ocean droplet are missing the point and are for sure paying with their time. If you've worked in web dev for a while you've probably tried to automate many of the above features yourself but it's just never going to be as robust as a service that has a dedicated support team behind it.

from Hacker News - New Comments: "WordPress" http://bit.ly/2UPOf3w
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