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Introducing Firebase Hosting

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Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#12

Post by taylorbuley »

drTriumph wrote: post #3

Hi HN, I'm the lead developer on Firebase Hosting and the post’s author. We're trying to build something that's both simple to use and a serious production grade product. We think we're pretty close to the mark but we'd love to hear how we can improve it. Let us know in the comments (or email me at chris@firebase.com).

Can you provide any background on Firebase's thinking for where this, strategy-wise, fits into the platform?

For example, is this supposed to be more of an add-on service for folks who already use Firebase or intended to woo new developers?

Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#13

Post by thomasfromcdnjs »

Why are connections always the selling point for these real time services? Are they actually the most expensive thing to scale or just the most required therefore most profitable?

Edit: The surcharges for going over the limits seem a bit high. (Candle Plan: $0.25 each additional connection). Get some spike in traffic that causes 2000 visitors to your site for an hour and pay $500 lol

Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#15

Post by colevscode »

Brilliant work guys. Choice of initial features seems right on for a developer focused hosting service. At first I was a bit confused by the SSL offering for custom domains, until I saw that firebase actually acquires the cert and configures it. That's a huge pain point, bravo.

Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#19

Post by mikeryan »

taylorbuley wrote: post #12
drTriumph wrote: post #3

Hi HN, I'm the lead developer on Firebase Hosting and the post’s author. We're trying to build something that's both simple to use and a serious production grade product. We think we're pretty close to the mark but we'd love to hear how we can improve it. Let us know in the comments (or email me at chris@firebase.com).

Can you provide any background on Firebase's thinking for where this, strategy-wise, fits into the platform? For example, is this supposed to be more of an add-on service for folks who already use Firebase or intended to woo new developers?

Firebase gives you the ability to create dynamic pages with no backend requirement. This left a really small gap that the developer still had to host that HTML/JS page somewhere. So Firebase already supplied the backend now they also supply the hosting.

Re: Introducing Firebase Hosting

#20

Post by primitivesuave »

Firebase is a revolutionary tool, and this is the last piece that was missing from the big picture. It's hard to imagine a Firebase-driven world today, but in 5 years developers will need to quickly deploy and iterate on real-time applications, for which a system like this is ideal. Lay out your database, set up login and security rules, and deploy your application, all through the same service.

However, the lack of benchmarks is a bit disconcerting. Hosting and SSL are great, but if the page loads are slow I'd rather pay money to host them elsewhere.

Also, there is the single-point-of-failure problem, which materialized yesterday when Firebase went down. Although the outage was only for a couple minutes (a lot faster than it would take me to troubleshoot a downed Rails app), it made me realize the dangers of relying on a single system for all of your web application's needs.

Overall, I think Firebase is just going to get better and better. They still need to integrate payments, file upload, and the ability to make API calls to external services, but by adding hosting they are demonstrating a desire to provide services for the full stack. Also, there is a brilliant team of people behind Firebase, so I'm sure that my ideas for Firebase are only the tip of the iceberg.

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