Welcome to 1997! This is how Geocities, Tripod etc worked back then (I think geocities.ws has FTP access too, for the complete experience). Amazing to see the web coming full circle even on this.

Heh, I'm old enough to remember that experience!

But yeah, it's basically like that but with some more modern features like being able to do this from a browser (no filezilla required!) and better control over HTTP headers and such.

All of that could be done in Geocities as well =)

Geocities was enormously popular for good reasons.

However, I don’t think it had the ability to preview a deploy or roll it back with 100% certainty that it will be exactly as was before, which is something you really need when deploying is (too) easy.

I have seen those exact words to describe Netlify - it's like Geocities, but for the modern web. I have yet to try it out for myself, but I'm thinking I may use it to get a personal site up and running since I have a tendency to take the power of running my own site on my own VPS a bit too far by changing it up (and usually breaking it) frequently...

There's also Neocities as an acceptable replacement for Geocities. It's also free, unless you want to use your own domain, which requires a $5/mo "donation" to become a Neocities supporter and unlock that and a few other features.

I wonder how they are doing. I hope they don't share the same fate as Geocities.

The guy who runs the site gave a talk a while back about how crazy cheap it is to host it, and why cloud vendors like Amazon and Google are making suckers out of people.

"High Volume, Bandwidth Heavy Infrastructure On The Cheap"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i6wvix6buI

And I'm pretty sure he's also cryptocoin-rich, anyway.

If they have but a few supporters I suppose they get all the running costs out of it.

> One feature I haven't seen in the comments here is the ability to just drag and drop an entire website folder from your harddisk to Netlify and it's live within seconds. Which worked great for a couple of older personal websites I had.

How is this different than `aws s3 sync local/ s3://your-website.com`?

1. With Netlify you don't need to install any command line tool. For non-technical users it's a must.

2. Netlify is a CDN, so "dragging and dropping" would be equivalent to setting up S3 + Cloudfront.

3. You have to create the bucket before running this command. With Netlify you just drag and drop and it takes a couple seconds (if the site is small enough to be built that fast).

4. Netlify is also able to run a build phase before deploying. With S3 you have to do it locally or setup a remote machine.

npm install netlify-cli -g

The big win for me, and the reason I use Netlify, is that it gives you atomic deploys without any effort. `aws s3 sync` works fine in most cases, but its not atomic, so if you want to make sure what you're deploying is going to work for 100% of users all the time you end up having to build something more complex - at the simplest that involves adding a hash to all your files, making sure they're deployed, and only then pushing index.html (and any other entrypoints).

With Netlify I can just hook it up to Github and they'll handle running any build scripts, and then smoothly flip from the previous version to the new one in single action.

Usability is a killer feature. It’s possible to build a website without understanding how to use the command line. I know I managed it when I was younger!

It's just as easy with Netlify's tool too

netlifyctl deploy --publish-directory local/ --site-id site_id

You're missing out on the brave new future! netlifyctl is dormant, upgrade to netlify-cli: https://github.com/netlify/cli

seems to be similar, but with some nice add-on features for not that much.