The funny thing for me is how much more intuitive this is when you run an actual server, or vps, and how fundamental it is in that context ("Oh crap, bunch of views, they are slowing this laptop down a bunch!") while being so much more involved here.
I'm hesitant to generalize past myself, but I really wish someone made me learn the basics on a web server in my own home, where I could reboot it by pulling out a power cord, and transfer files with a usb stick. I would have been so much more able to make thought out trade-offs or attempt grander things.
Its straight-forward and free (at the margin) to throw up a password protected site on a server, but daunting in SaaS world. Same story for having a bash script update some page with a gnuplot chart with data obtained via curl/wget, vs. CORS and an API, and a charting library, and json ...
I shudder to think of how much time I wasted as I was just learning web anything on solutions that were way too big and complex for my goals at the time - from docker, to lambdas, AWS orbit based nuclear powered whatever to run a clock widget or whatnot. I'm certainly glad I learned those things, and they are scalable and safer and all those good things, but hard to put into context without knowing how one stupid server doing it all by itself would do it.
This is all a drawn out way of saying that the cheapest lightsail vps is like 3 bucks a month, and you can implement all the fanciest netlify features right on it, and if you never have done that, you really should. If anything when you do move to netlify, you will really appreciate it on a different level.
> lightsail vps is like 3 bucks a month, and you can implement all the fanciest netlify features right on it, and if you never have done that, you really should
Can you expand what Netlify features you're talking about or provide any guides/links that would steer a newbie in the right direction? I appreciate the "back to basics" attitude, but don't know where to even get started...
^^ This is isn't tax, legal, or sysadmin advice. SanchoPanda doesn't offer tax, legal, or sysadmin advice. Please consult your tax, legal, or sysadmin advisor before making any tax, legal, or web infrastructure related decisions.
Seems like a big miss on their part. I love Netlify and I use them for my personal site. When I got their newsletter email announcing this, the first thought that entered my head was: "Finally! I can take Google Analytics off my site. About time a serious contender took on GA."
Unfortunately this costs $108/year more than GA. And while there are a couple of GA alternatives out there, having the financial backing of someone like Netlify makes a big difference. I don't want to think about analytics, I just want to know roughly how much traffic my site is getting, not having to worry about an open source project dying in the next year and having to find yet another replacement.
GA is nice for client-side stuff, but Adblock has made the numbers completely unreliable, especially for tech-focused content. Instead I prefer to just use server-side logs. At my tiny scale it's easy to just assume each IP is a unique, and people are free to block GA without affecting my metrics.
This makes a ton of sense of for Netlify, and I hope they keep improving on it. If this existed 5 months ago I might not have rolled my own analytics using Netlify functions and Google Spreadsheets^. As it is, $9 per site, and an inability to log client-side routing make it not worth switching from my own, super customizable event-based solution (would have to come up with a new API schema for calling URLs to log specific events / goals).
This is excellent. The first thing I did was remove GA. It's also incredible that they backfill data.
Yes, it costs money. But this is exactly what I want, and Netlify now has a significant incentive not to do anything shady with the data (and by not using cookies or JavaScript, they hamstring any potential ability to sell the data anyway).
The funny thing about this is tons of developers are using Netlify for SPA's and therefore only that first request will be caught by their edge nodes, all subsequent page views will be missed.
(i work there) lets just say this has not escaped our attention and we even discussed holding off launching until we had an easy way to log an incremental pageview from the clientside. ultimately we decided to ship first and iterate later. limiting the scope was definitely helpful running up to the launch.
Should be noted that Netlify provides a lot of tools for JAMstack sites, like their Netlify CMS (which you can self-host if you're determined) and Netlify Functions.
If you need the SPA framework for productivity reasons, then you could use something like Gridsome to have it generate a static site.
I was thinking the same. Realistically, I believe the only way you could do that on the client would be JS. But if they added that, it would change all their feel good marketing about no JS...
That landing page does not have a single screenshot of what you get for $9 per month. Do you pay the $9 and then find out what the analytics page you're getting is going to look like, and if it's suitable for your website?
Readit News
I'm hesitant to generalize past myself, but I really wish someone made me learn the basics on a web server in my own home, where I could reboot it by pulling out a power cord, and transfer files with a usb stick. I would have been so much more able to make thought out trade-offs or attempt grander things.
Its straight-forward and free (at the margin) to throw up a password protected site on a server, but daunting in SaaS world. Same story for having a bash script update some page with a gnuplot chart with data obtained via curl/wget, vs. CORS and an API, and a charting library, and json ...
I shudder to think of how much time I wasted as I was just learning web anything on solutions that were way too big and complex for my goals at the time - from docker, to lambdas, AWS orbit based nuclear powered whatever to run a clock widget or whatnot. I'm certainly glad I learned those things, and they are scalable and safer and all those good things, but hard to put into context without knowing how one stupid server doing it all by itself would do it.
This is all a drawn out way of saying that the cheapest lightsail vps is like 3 bucks a month, and you can implement all the fanciest netlify features right on it, and if you never have done that, you really should. If anything when you do move to netlify, you will really appreciate it on a different level.
Can you expand what Netlify features you're talking about or provide any guides/links that would steer a newbie in the right direction? I appreciate the "back to basics" attitude, but don't know where to even get started...
Poor Man's Netlify identity - Apache or nginx password rules.
Poor Man's Netlify Large Media Management - Upload some files over sftp.
Poor Man's Netlify Lambda functions - crontab -e, 0 * * * * LynxDumpWeatherToHomepage.sh.
Poor Man's Netlify Teams - Create a new user with access to that site.
Poor Man's Netlify Forms - A php form.
Poor Man's Netlify Analytics - Less +F (or tail -f) web.log file.
^^ This is isn't tax, legal, or sysadmin advice. SanchoPanda doesn't offer tax, legal, or sysadmin advice. Please consult your tax, legal, or sysadmin advisor before making any tax, legal, or web infrastructure related decisions.
Probably most people’s time in maintenance and development is worth more than $9/month, that’s why these services exist.
Semi-related xkcd https://xkcd.com/1319/
Unfortunately this costs $108/year more than GA. And while there are a couple of GA alternatives out there, having the financial backing of someone like Netlify makes a big difference. I don't want to think about analytics, I just want to know roughly how much traffic my site is getting, not having to worry about an open source project dying in the next year and having to find yet another replacement.
^I wrote about it here: https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics
Yes, it costs money. But this is exactly what I want, and Netlify now has a significant incentive not to do anything shady with the data (and by not using cookies or JavaScript, they hamstring any potential ability to sell the data anyway).
Good work, I'm glad to be a Netlify customer.
If you need the SPA framework for productivity reasons, then you could use something like Gridsome to have it generate a static site.
Clicky, a freemium alternative to Google Analytics costs $10 per month for their Pro plan but that includes 10 websites.
Or Clicky's Pro Platinum plan costs $20 per month for 30 websites.
Kind of wish Netlify had gone with similar pricing