Moving to Netlify

Posted 3rd October 2019 in Development and Serverless

I’ve never enjoyed hosting. After all these years I’m comfortable enough poking round a server, but I’d be perfectly happy if I never had to SSH into another Linux box as long as I live. And Netlify looks like a good route into that happy place!

My website is now built with a static site generator and I moved it from my own server to Netlify a couple of weeks ago. So far, I’ve been very impressed. Here’s a quick run-down of my thoughts:

  • Google Lighthouse for ‘Best Practices’ was previously sitting in the high 90s, which was fine, but now it’s coming back with a perfect score
  • Deployment is easy, and I don’t need a service like DeployHQ sitting between GitHub and my server
  • SSL certificates are a piece of cake to set up and cron jobs for renewals are taken care of automatically
  • I had a concern about the Netlify subdomain (tempertemper.netlify.com) but I got around fairly easily with redirect in the Netlify config file
  • It opens the door to using server-side stuff like forms in my static site (via Netlify functions), though I don’t want to go too far down this route as it moves away from one of the things a static site should be: portable onto any server
  • I love the idea of Netlify Analytics – no more snooping by Google, and I don’t need or want any more info than Netlify provide anyway

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