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

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5 Options Considered

5 Options ConsideredPriceLast Updated
GitHub Pages
Oct 30, 2017
Amazon S3
Oct 15, 2017
GitLab Pages
Oct 7, 2017
Netlify
Oct 31, 2017
Firebase
Oct 15, 2017
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GitHub Pages

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Endi Sukaj
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.
Endi Sukaj
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.
Endi Sukaj
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.
Endi Sukaj
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.
Endi Sukaj
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.
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

Automatic minifying of assets

•••
GitHub will automatically minify assets as soon as they are uploaded.
Endi Sukaj
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 affec...
Endi Sukaj
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-62c887ea7cf54e743ecf...
See 6 more Pros & ConsSee 6 more Pros & Cons

Amazon S3

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Endi Sukaj
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.
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

Easily scalable

•••
There's no cap in storage or traffic. Costs is based on usage.
Endi Sukaj
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.
Endi Sukaj
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.
Endi Sukaj
Top Con

Unpredictable monthly charges

•••
Since costs are determined by usage, they vary month by month.
Endi Sukaj
Top Con

No SFTP support

•••
Amazon S3 does not have SFTP support, instead the S3 web interface has to be used.
See 4 more Pros & ConsSee 4 more Pros & Cons

GitLab Pages

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Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

Regular updates

•••
GitLab is being constantly worked on and has a new release every month.
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

Open Source

•••
Unlike BitBucket or GitHub, GitLab itself is Open Source. Even EE (which is needed for pages, but is free on Gitlab.com) is "source available".
Endi Sukaj
Top Pro

Easy to setup

•••
Gitlab pages are quick and simple to setup, with documentation that's short and fast to read through.
Endi Sukaj
Top Con

Enterprise Edition only

•••
The Pages feature is only available to those with an Enterprise Edition account.
See 2 more ProsSee 2 more Pros

Netlify

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Chloe Montanez
Abdullah Hilson
Top Pro

Custom domain and free SSL

•••
You can easily add your custom domain and configure SSL for free.
Chloe Montanez
Abdullah Hilson
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.
Abdullah Hilson
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.
Chloe Montanez
Abdullah Hilson
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.
Chloe Montanez
Abdullah Hilson
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.
Abdullah Hilson
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.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
See 5 more ProsSee 5 more Pros

Firebase

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Simon Knott
Top Pro

CI Support

•••
Simon Knott
Top Pro

Easy to Use

•••
WhiteLilac
Top Pro

Well documented

•••
The documentation and quick start guides are informative and easy to learn.
WhiteLilac
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
WhiteLilac
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.
WhiteLilac
Simon Knott
Top Con

May be Overkill

•••
You won't use most of the features just for hosting.
WhiteLilac
Top Con

Hosted

•••
Firebase locks you in to Google's service; you can't run it on your own servers.
See 5 more Pros & ConsSee 5 more Pros & Cons

9 Community Recommendations

Shawn Axsom
Carl Walsh
Alex
Endi Sukaj
Ryan
Abdullah Hilson
Simon Knott
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