It's as difference from that as Dropbox is from mounting an NFS share on your computer.

Could you elaborate on the difference here? Mounting an NFS share is almost universally easier, in my experience.

/woosh

I think the commenter is referring to this infamous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Haha... I wasn't on Hacker News then, so I beg your forgiveness :)

That's funny, but as someone who still does not use drop box, NFS shares seem a lot easier to me than setting up drop box. I think I tried drop box once but I found it more onerous to log in than to type mount /mnt/nfs , so.... I guess I'm not the target market (and that's okay!).

Could you elaborate? That would be very helpful, the article doesn't quite detail ...

The end result is the same as hosting on S3 + CloudFront, it just saves you a lot of trouble setting things up, makes things just work, gives you nice features like lambdas, A/B testing, forms, authentication, etc etc for free, and just makes your life super easy.

Basically, if you have a repository with your Jekyll (or whatever) site, just add it to Netlify and that's it. It's served, and will automatically update when you push.

I have a Hugo site on github pages, and it's updated whenever I push. And no Netlify in the middle.

Funny enough I went from exactly that to gitlab+netlify setup. You get loads out of the box, HTTPS being the big one. In case you didn't get the reference, the other comment was the top comment for dropbox when it announced funding. In theory yes you can still roll your own dropbox, but we all have limited resources and dropbox and netlify make things so much easier that it's worth paying them money to do it right on the first try and not worry about maintenance.

Firebase does free certs on custom domains. Publish is a single command.