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?
Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z
51–60 of 96 posts
Re: Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z
#52I 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!
HTTPS on S3 is quite easy, only requiring the addition of CloudFront.
It looks like there's quite a bit involved: https://medium.com/@sbuckpesch/setup-aws-s3-static-website-h...
Sure it's "easy" in the sense that the hardest part is editing some JSON, but with Netlify once the site is set up it's literally one click to provision and apply an SSL cert.
Re: Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so much when you need a feature not included in free. And free is always subject to change.
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...)
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.
Re: Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
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 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.
Honestly curious, was it slow on your browser? The entire website is ridiculously fast for me.
Re: Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z
#55Anything on the roadmap for supporting server-side (api, db, etc.) in the same way?
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?
Re: Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
For small/personal sites the pricing model is "Free". I think that tends to work well :)
Not so much when you need a feature not included in free. And free is always subject to change.
disclaimer: I work for Netlify.
We've changed pricing models 3 times since I've worked here. Each time we've grandfathered people in at their old pricing level, and the last change also gave away substantially more features for free. Never have we moved someone's cheese from "free" to "not free".
I understand that this is still a risk - I'm not promising it will never happen - but we have a killer track record of giving away more, not less, over time, and never have we changed the pricing for an existing site (except to give away enough features that many folks downgraded from paid to free with the last change - and even that was opt-in in case you for some reason wanted to keep paying us :D )
Re: Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z
#57Anything on the roadmap for supporting server-side (api, db, etc.) in the same way?
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?
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.
Re: Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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.
Honestly curious, was it slow on your browser? The entire website is ridiculously fast for me.
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.
Re: Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
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 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.
The number of HTTP requests is not a big deal now with HTTP2. See here where it's no longer recommended to concatenate JS files:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/http-2-for-web-developers/
Is YSlow (which warns about too many HTTP requests) still updated? There's been no updates for 3 years here:
Re: Netlify Raises $12M from A16Z
#60Anything on the roadmap for supporting server-side (api, db, etc.) in the same way?
Disclaimer: I work for Netlify
If you check out this blog post about one of our biggest customers, you can see that there are some non-static services involved (look for the list of 4 services all called Go):
https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/03/16/smashing-magazine-ju...
So - while I wouldn't say we're planning to become a DB host or anything - we are both open to providing some glue needed to bring some missing pieces together for static sites without vendor lock in (all of those are open source and you can run your own instances - they are also all being polished up right now so keep an eye on the one(s) that interest you)...and we are trying to enable other services we don't want to reinvent - things like auth0 and firebase - for interoperability with our service.
oh yeah, and we also open sourced a CMS that uses Git as a backing store so your content editors won't have to learn markdown or git... https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms
So - we're not done yet :)