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This is interesting; I use Netlify for a Gatsby/Contentful website, as well as for a Netlify CMS one. I don't pay for any of it, so it's hard find a reason to m

This is interesting; I use Netlify for a Gatsby/Contentful website, as well as for a Netlify CMS one. I don't pay for any of it, so it's hard find a reason to move away. What are some of the problems you've seen people have with Netlify? Other than not being in control of the infrastructure of course.

WA 6y ago
If you don’t pay, it’s rather slow. A lot slower than my static pages on a VPS I rent.
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  > If you don’t pay, it’s rather slow. I have several free sites on Netlify and none of them seem slow at all - all three sites load in under 450ms on Chrome. How much faster are your sites loading? Is it a shared VPS or dedicated? Just curious how you categorize "rather slow" is all.
  - swyx 6y ago
    its also location dependent. the cdn for the free tier is different (less PoPs) than the cdn for the enterprise tier.
  - WA 6y ago
    > I have several free sites on Netlify and none of them seem slow at all - all three sites load in under 450ms on Chrome. Does this also measure the time to connect to the server? Not sure if Chrome is perfectly correct. I used https://tools.pingdom.com https://tools.pingdom.com I'm German. My free Netlify sites load twice as slow from Germany than from the US. US: 1.2s, Germany ~2.5s (and I thought Netlify has servers all around the world?!) But still, 1.2s is very slow imho. My website on a dedicated VPS, hosted in Germany, loads in 1.2s from the US and 200ms from Germany. The connection time being the slowest part of all. All websites are static and rather small. Maybe it's unfair to compare the free Netlify server to a paid dedicated VPS, but since this thread is about "self-hosting" vs "using Netlify", I just pointed out that Netlify is slower in my case.
    - jslakro 6y ago
      How do you measure your webpage load time from different countries?
pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
I found the Netlify CLI pretty exasperating to use. In addition to it just being straight up information overload at any given step, the feedback it does print out is often misleading or the opposite of helpful in some other way. More from my notes on that day: > My use case is to deploy a static site. I have a directory containing the pages. I've installed the Netlify CLI (itself a stupidly fiddly process). [And I've read the docs by now.] I should be able to init and deploy, trivially, right? Wrong. Without even trying I ran into some crash bugs in the CLI, for what seems to be a bog-standard use case. On a hunch, I decided to check what would happen if I moved the .git subdirectory somewhere else and re-ran. And whaddaya know, I found that it worked reliably when there was no .git subdirectory anywhere to be found, and it reliably failed when it was present. So even though the contents of .git/ are completely irrelevant for the use case, the CLI is evidently both (a) trying to do something with it, and (b) making some bold assumptions about what's in there and failing hard. My money is on "Nobody at Netlify is even testing this." (FWIW, no I didn't report this. The overall "feel" of their stuff leads me to believe it would be a painful experience with no upside. Several years ago, I interacted with some Netlify folks early after their launch to give some feedback that was more of the sort "I'm reaching out to inform you of a problem for your own benefit and help you resolve it" than it was anything like "I'm here to get you to help me with my problem". The overall tone of the responses were pretty obnoxious under those circumstances, so I noped out and never gave them any serious consideration until this year, where I discovered the situation above. I have to say it pretty much validated my early opinion.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- swyx 6y ago
  (previously worked at Netlify) sorry to hear about your prior experience. fwiw the CLI was not fully staffed for a long time - but as of last year at least 2 engs are working on it fulltime and they should have capacity to look into your usecase if serious enough. yes, the CLI looks into .git, no i'm not sure if it was needed for what you were trying to do, but also no i have never run into the issue you describe as an almost-daily user of netlify for 4 years

WA 6y ago

If you don’t pay, it’s rather slow. A lot slower than my static pages on a VPS I rent.

at-fates-hands 6y ago
> If you don’t pay, it’s rather slow. I have several free sites on Netlify and none of them seem slow at all - all three sites load in under 450ms on Chrome. How much faster are your sites loading? Is it a shared VPS or dedicated? Just curious how you categorize "rather slow" is all.
- swyx 6y ago
  its also location dependent. the cdn for the free tier is different (less PoPs) than the cdn for the enterprise tier.
- WA 6y ago
  > I have several free sites on Netlify and none of them seem slow at all - all three sites load in under 450ms on Chrome. Does this also measure the time to connect to the server? Not sure if Chrome is perfectly correct. I used https://tools.pingdom.com https://tools.pingdom.com I'm German. My free Netlify sites load twice as slow from Germany than from the US. US: 1.2s, Germany ~2.5s (and I thought Netlify has servers all around the world?!) But still, 1.2s is very slow imho. My website on a dedicated VPS, hosted in Germany, loads in 1.2s from the US and 200ms from Germany. The connection time being the slowest part of all. All websites are static and rather small. Maybe it's unfair to compare the free Netlify server to a paid dedicated VPS, but since this thread is about "self-hosting" vs "using Netlify", I just pointed out that Netlify is slower in my case.
  - jslakro 6y ago
    How do you measure your webpage load time from different countries?

pwdisswordfish0 6y ago

I found the Netlify CLI pretty exasperating to use. In addition to it just being straight up information overload at any given step, the feedback it does print out is often misleading or the opposite of helpful in some other way. More from my notes on that day: > My use case is to deploy a static site. I have a directory containing the pages. I've installed the Netlify CLI (itself a stupidly fiddly process). [And I've read the docs by now.] I should be able to init and deploy, trivially, right? Wrong. Without even trying I ran into some crash bugs in the CLI, for what seems to be a bog-standard use case. On a hunch, I decided to check what would happen if I moved the .git subdirectory somewhere else and re-ran. And whaddaya know, I found that it worked reliably when there was no .git subdirectory anywhere to be found, and it reliably failed when it was present. So even though the contents of .git/ are completely irrelevant for the use case, the CLI is evidently both (a) trying to do something with it, and (b) making some bold assumptions about what's in there and failing hard. My money is on "Nobody at Netlify is even testing this." (FWIW, no I didn't report this. The overall "feel" of their stuff leads me to believe it would be a painful experience with no upside. Several years ago, I interacted with some Netlify folks early after their launch to give some feedback that was more of the sort "I'm reaching out to inform you of a problem for your own benefit and help you resolve it" than it was anything like "I'm here to get you to help me with my problem". The overall tone of the responses were pretty obnoxious under those circumstances, so I noped out and never gave them any serious consideration until this year, where I discovered the situation above. I have to say it pretty much validated my early opinion.)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
swyx 6y ago
(previously worked at Netlify) sorry to hear about your prior experience. fwiw the CLI was not fully staffed for a long time - but as of last year at least 2 engs are working on it fulltime and they should have capacity to look into your usecase if serious enough. yes, the CLI looks into .git, no i'm not sure if it was needed for what you were trying to do, but also no i have never run into the issue you describe as an almost-daily user of netlify for 4 years