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One feature I haven't seen in the comments here is the ability to just drag and drop an entire website folder from your harddisk to Netlify and it's live within

by LeonM 8y ago

One feature I haven't seen in the comments here is the ability to just drag and drop an entire website folder from your harddisk to Netlify and it's live within seconds. Which worked great for a couple of older personal websites I had. Second feature that is great is that you can use the cli to perform a draft deploy, which generates a unique public URL which you can share with your testers/marketeers/writers/translators etc. It's a great and easy way to quickly share test versions without having to set up auth (the draft URL's are a hash, so pretty long and unguessable). Third useful feature is that Netlify can capture form submits. It's quite basic but works great if you have to whip up a quick page to gather email addresses, RSVP's etc. It's also great that they have integrated Lets Encrypt, but Netlify did experience a bad outage a couple of weeks ago where wrong certs were served (for a different domain) causing a big scary warning for our visitors. Luckily this was resolved pretty quickly, but you do feel pretty powerless when something like that happens. At Mailhardener we run most of our static content from Netlify and we are very pleased with the service that Netlify offers.

ricardobeat 8y ago
Welcome to 1997! This is how Geocities, Tripod etc worked back then (I think geocities.ws has FTP access too, for the complete experience). Amazing to see the web coming full circle even on this.
- caiob 8y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. And we all thought technology wasn't cyclical.
- LeonM 8y ago
  Heh, I'm old enough to remember that experience! But yeah, it's basically like that but with some more modern features like being able to do this from a browser (no filezilla required!) and better control over HTTP headers and such.
  - genericone 8y ago
    All of that could be done in Geocities as well =)
    - tobr 8y ago
      Geocities was enormously popular for good reasons. However, I don’t think it had the ability to preview a deploy or roll it back with 100% certainty that it will be exactly as was before, which is something you really need when deploying is (too) easy.
- shadowoflight 8y ago
  I have seen those exact words to describe Netlify - it's like Geocities, but for the modern web. I have yet to try it out for myself, but I'm thinking I may use it to get a personal site up and running since I have a tendency to take the power of running my own site on my own VPS a bit too far by changing it up (and usually breaking it) frequently...
  - tw20190409mhbcd 8y ago
    There's also Neocities as an acceptable replacement for Geocities. It's also free, unless you want to use your own domain, which requires a $5/mo "donation" to become a Neocities supporter and unlock that and a few other features.
    - egeozcan 8y ago
      I wonder how they are doing. I hope they don't share the same fate as Geocities.
      - Aeolun 8y ago
        If they have but a few supporters I suppose they get all the running costs out of it.
      - tw20190409mhbcd 8y ago
        The guy who runs the site gave a talk a while back about how crazy cheap it is to host it, and why cloud vendors like Amazon and Google are making suckers out of people. "High Volume, Bandwidth Heavy Infrastructure On The Cheap" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6wvix6buI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6wvix6buI And I'm pretty sure he's also cryptocoin-rich, anyway.
jniedrauer 8y ago
> One feature I haven't seen in the comments here is the ability to just drag and drop an entire website folder from your harddisk to Netlify and it's live within seconds. Which worked great for a couple of older personal websites I had. How is this different than `aws s3 sync local/ s3://your-website.com`?
- HeyImAlex 8y ago
  Usability is a killer feature. It’s possible to build a website without understanding how to use the command line. I know I managed it when I was younger!
- toastal 8y ago
  It's just as easy with Netlify's tool too netlifyctl deploy --publish-directory local/ --site-id site_id
  - _fool 8y ago
    You're missing out on the brave new future! netlifyctl is dormant, upgrade to netlify-cli: https://github.com/netlify/cli https://github.com/netlify/cli
- revvx 8y ago
  1. With Netlify you don't need to install any command line tool. For non-technical users it's a must. 2. Netlify is a CDN, so "dragging and dropping" would be equivalent to setting up S3 + Cloudfront. 3. You have to create the bucket before running this command. With Netlify you just drag and drop and it takes a couple seconds (if the site is small enough to be built that fast). 4. Netlify is also able to run a build phase before deploying. With S3 you have to do it locally or setup a remote machine.
  - xtracto 8y ago
    npm install netlify-cli -g
- jon-wood 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by LeonM 8y ago

ricardobeat 8y ago

Welcome to 1997! This is how Geocities, Tripod etc worked back then (I think geocities.ws has FTP access too, for the complete experience). Amazing to see the web coming full circle even on this.

caiob 8y ago
Exactly my thoughts. And we all thought technology wasn't cyclical.
LeonM 8y ago
Heh, I'm old enough to remember that experience! But yeah, it's basically like that but with some more modern features like being able to do this from a browser (no filezilla required!) and better control over HTTP headers and such.
- genericone 8y ago
  All of that could be done in Geocities as well =)
  - tobr 8y ago
    Geocities was enormously popular for good reasons. However, I don’t think it had the ability to preview a deploy or roll it back with 100% certainty that it will be exactly as was before, which is something you really need when deploying is (too) easy.
shadowoflight 8y ago
I have seen those exact words to describe Netlify - it's like Geocities, but for the modern web. I have yet to try it out for myself, but I'm thinking I may use it to get a personal site up and running since I have a tendency to take the power of running my own site on my own VPS a bit too far by changing it up (and usually breaking it) frequently...
- tw20190409mhbcd 8y ago
  There's also Neocities as an acceptable replacement for Geocities. It's also free, unless you want to use your own domain, which requires a $5/mo "donation" to become a Neocities supporter and unlock that and a few other features.
  - egeozcan 8y ago
    I wonder how they are doing. I hope they don't share the same fate as Geocities.
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      If they have but a few supporters I suppose they get all the running costs out of it.
    - tw20190409mhbcd 8y ago
      The guy who runs the site gave a talk a while back about how crazy cheap it is to host it, and why cloud vendors like Amazon and Google are making suckers out of people. "High Volume, Bandwidth Heavy Infrastructure On The Cheap" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6wvix6buI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6wvix6buI And I'm pretty sure he's also cryptocoin-rich, anyway.

jniedrauer 8y ago

> One feature I haven't seen in the comments here is the ability to just drag and drop an entire website folder from your harddisk to Netlify and it's live within seconds. Which worked great for a couple of older personal websites I had. How is this different than `aws s3 sync local/ s3://your-website.com`?

HeyImAlex 8y ago
Usability is a killer feature. It’s possible to build a website without understanding how to use the command line. I know I managed it when I was younger!
toastal 8y ago
It's just as easy with Netlify's tool too netlifyctl deploy --publish-directory local/ --site-id site_id
- _fool 8y ago
  You're missing out on the brave new future! netlifyctl is dormant, upgrade to netlify-cli: https://github.com/netlify/cli https://github.com/netlify/cli
revvx 8y ago
1. With Netlify you don't need to install any command line tool. For non-technical users it's a must. 2. Netlify is a CDN, so "dragging and dropping" would be equivalent to setting up S3 + Cloudfront. 3. You have to create the bucket before running this command. With Netlify you just drag and drop and it takes a couple seconds (if the site is small enough to be built that fast). 4. Netlify is also able to run a build phase before deploying. With S3 you have to do it locally or setup a remote machine.
- xtracto 8y ago
  npm install netlify-cli -g
jon-wood 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]