When comparing ZEIT Now vs GitHub Pages, the Slant community recommends GitHub Pages for most people. In the question“What are the best website hosting providers?” GitHub Pages is ranked 1st while ZEIT Now is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose GitHub Pages is:
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.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Deployments via a simple command line command
Installing their CLI and calling "now" inside your project's root will automatically build your project, whether it may be a Node.js or a Docker app , or maybe a static website, it works on the platform.
Pro Custom domain support
ZEIT Now supports custom domains, if that doesn't ring your bell, they also allow you to buy a domain directly from ZEIT, and even from the CLI.
Pro From the developers of Hyper Terminal and Next.js
The renowned developers of the Hyper Terminal and Framework for React applications develops and maintains this platform.
Pro Good support
You can talk to the staff anytime via their slack real-time, or mail them. They provide good assistance and will help you on any questions or issues on the platform.
Pro In-depth documentation
The documentation is very in-depth and can help you understand on how to make your application work on the platform.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pro Allows for all the git features when building your site, too
Cons
Con Docker builds can only execute at the CMD Layer
ZEIT Now executes everything using docker run, so whatever was defined in the CMD Layer, is what will ZEIT will only execute.
Con Node.js apps has no access to the instance's filesystem
Once the Node.js build has completed, the only accessible directory is /tmp, which makes any file operation impossible outside the /tmp directory.
Con Free plan makes your code public
Unless you upgrade to a paid plan, the source code can be easily viewed by others.
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