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Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

netlify.com

21–30 of 187 posts

Re: Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

#23

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/

I loved using Divshot, and was sad when their service was shuttered. I’ve been using Netlify ever since, though, and have launched 20+ web projects in the past 18 months. Easily my favorite hosting solution I’ve ever used.

[deleted]

Re: Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

#24
post #21

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.

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.

Re: Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

#27

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/

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

Re: Netlify raises $30M to replace webservers with Application Delivery Network

#28
post #3

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?

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 he…

And if your main dynamic features are things like handling forms or an occasional db call on the backend, this isn't a bad approach. It's cheaper and less maintenance generally for a lot of simple cases, but obviously won't apply to all cases equally well.
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