The answer could be, "Well, obviously, it's not for database-backed websites", or "Obviously it's perfect for database-backed websites, because now you can use their X feature for your database", or "Obviously, you use some other company to host your database but Netlify for everything else, which is a great improvement because...", or whatever.
What am I obviously missing?
You can call api's from JS and host your database separately, also possible that people use some kind of "serverless" database like google firebase.
Right, and the rest of them—a very significant portion—do. And yes, I realize that it's possible to use JS to fetch from anywhere, but what I'm wondering is what people are thinking when talking about Netlify.
Are they thinking that this isn't really for database-backed websites but can be used if some other Netlify advantage justifies putting your database and the server code that uses it in different timezones? Or is it the opposite, that this is actually a better way of managing a database-backed website?
What is the positioning of this new type of managed hosting with respect to websites that depend on databases full of, say, customer data? It seems as though that would be a FAQ, not an exotic niche.
See addons: https://www.netlify.com/products/
Also services like this allow you to have a "cms" which is the typical use of a db for _most_ websites: https://www.contentful.com/.
You are correct, heavy db users probably wouldn't go with a service like this :)
It deploys when you push, is based on Jekyll, and GitHub handles all of the hosting/HTTPS/caching themselves.
Out of the box support for prerendering is also fantastic too – https://www.netlify.com/docs/prerendering/
I've been really happy using Netlify (with Jekyll) for https://www.checkbot.io/ - I didn't have to think about server admin at all when I got traffic spikes from Hacker News and Product Hunt traffic, and development features make working on the website really straightforward.
Features I like:
- Git based deploys automatically when you make a commit
- Git based rollbacks if there's a problem with the latest commit
- non-master Git branches are automatically deployed for preview
- automatic CDN + HTTPS setup
- no servers to admin i.e. they deal with security, scaling and configuration for you
- they do instant cache invalidation of images/CSS/JS files for you so there's no stale files being served after deploys
- before deploying you can run complex build scripts on Netlify to generate files to be deployed e.g. any static site generator you want to use, run arbitrary NPM scripts, you can download data that to be rendered on to a page
- you can use Netlify CMS as a friendly web interface to edit blog posts, articles and FAQs. It's easy enough for non-technical people so it's possible to use for standard business websites that would normally require something more complex to admin like WordPress.
You can cobble together something like the above yourself but Netlify makes it simple and robust so you can get on with more important things.
People that say you can do something similar with e.g. a Digital Ocean droplet are missing the point and are for sure paying with their time. If you've worked in web dev for a while you've probably tried to automate many of the above features yourself but it's just never going to be as robust as a service that has a dedicated support team behind it.