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What are the best (price and uptime) IaaS to deploy a JAMstack website / web-app?

5

Options
Considered

9

User
Recs.

Oct 31, 2017

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

5 Options Considered

Best (price and uptime) IaaS to deploy a JAMstack website / web-app	Price	Last Updated
-- GitHub Pages	-	Oct 30, 2017
-- Amazon S3	-	Oct 15, 2017
-- GitLab Pages	-	Oct 7, 2017
-- Netlify	-	Oct 31, 2017
-- Firebase	-	Oct 15, 2017

GitHub Pages

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Top Pro

Supports custom domains

A custom domain can be added by creating a CNAME file with the necessary domain in the root of the repository and adding/changing corresponding DNS entries. See More

Top Con

For a custom domain users still have to use "www"

Due to GitHub's DDoS mitigation technology, users who host their static websites on their servers, cannot have a custom root domain. For example: "example.com" cannot be used, "www.example.com" must be used instead. While in theory the first one is allowed, it greatly affects loading times. See More

Top Pro

The ability to create and edit files on the web UI gives GitHub pages the same power as a small CMS

One of GitHub's features is a very powerful web editor which helps users edit or even create files right from the web browser, once the file is saved it's the same as a commit. Coupled with pages, this tool becomes even more powerful, giving users a free CMS that is easy to use and create. See More

Top Con

Unable to set cache expiry, must accept GitHub defaults (which are short)

Low cache expires - GitHub sets the cache-control: max-age header to 600 seconds, or ten minutes. Normally, you would set this value to a year so that it stays cached, and then use fingerprinting on your assets. Instead of serving style.css, you would serve something like style-62c887ea7cf54e743ecf3ce6c62a4ed6.css. As it stands now, assets are rarely going to be cached on repeat visits. This will give a low score on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights with a 'should fix' recommendation around 'Leverage browser caching'. For a high traffic site this may have implications See More

Top Pro

Free tier

Static websites can be hosted on GitHub Pages for free as long as the repository is public. Private repositories start at $7/mo. See More

Top Pro

Supports Jekyll

A simple, blog-aware static site generator, Jekyll makes it easy to create site-wide headers and footers without having to copy them across every page. It also offers some other advanced templating features. See More

Top Pro

CDN support out of the box

GitHub gives CDN support out of the box for GitHub pages. Fastly, one of the best CDNs right now is the one behind this service. See More

Top Pro

Automatic minifying of assets

GitHub will automatically minify assets as soon as they are uploaded. See More

Amazon S3

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Top Pro

Super cheap with a year's worth of free service

S3 storage costs $0.03 per GB and gets cheaper the more is stored, PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests are $0.005 per 1,000 requests and GET and all other requests are $0.004 per 10,000 requests. And with some restrictions is available for free for a year. See More

Top Con

Confusing web interface

Amazon S3's web interface is quite confusing, especially for first-time users, but there are many tutorials online that help beginners to set up a static site on S3. See More

Top Pro

Supports custom root domains

To set up a custom domain, Amazon Route 53 has to be configured as the DNS provider with the domain registrar, two buckets have to be created and configured with the name the same as the domain - one including, one excluding www. A more in-depth explanation can be found here. See More

Top Con

Unpredictable monthly charges

Since costs are determined by usage, they vary month by month. See More

Top Pro

Easily scalable

There's no cap in storage or traffic. Costs is based on usage. See More

Top Con

No SFTP support

Amazon S3 does not have SFTP support, instead the S3 web interface has to be used. See More

Netlify

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Top Pro

Custom domain and free SSL

You can easily add your custom domain and configure SSL for free. See More

Top Pro

Easy configuration, automatic deploys

The configuration is very simple and preconfigured for most static sites generators/frameworks. You fill 4 fields, you wait 2 minutes and your app is deployed. See More

Top Pro

Support very responsible

The support is very good, even when you use only the free tier, they are very quick to respond and are really helpful. See More

Top Pro

Integration with GitHub

The integration with GitHub gives you a deploy preview for all branches and Pull Requests. It sends notifications to GitHub with deploy URL. Very useful for reviewers. See More

Top Pro

CDN integrated

Netlify offers very good performance out of the box with his CDN and claims that you don't need to use Cloudflare. See More

Top Pro

Free tier that is really enough

The free tier that Netlify offers is full of features that are enough for most use cases. See More

Firebase

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CI Support

Top Con

May be Overkill

You won't use most of the features just for hosting. See More

Top Pro

Easy to Use

Top Con

Hosted

Firebase locks you in to Google's service; you can't run it on your own servers. See More

Top Pro

Well documented

The documentation and quick start guides are informative and easy to learn. See More

Top Pro

Assured future support

Google acquired Firebase in Oct. 2014. This gives Firebase a degree of trustworthiness in their service and future support since they are backed by such a large company See More

Top Pro

One command deploys and rollbacks

The content is deployed immediately through the Firebase CLI. Once it's uploaded, the content is served immediately. If you have made a mistake, you don't need to re-upload a new version, through the Admin dashboard you can easily rollback to a previous version. See More

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