I had honestly never heard of Netlify. I thought GitHub Pages was the standard, with S3 static hosting a second (more involved) option.

EDIT: Googling suggests Netlify offers a build, deploy, hosting pipeline all-in-one box. Which is substantially more than any of the projects mentioned here. These serve a single purpose - simple hosting of static websites.

Netlify can also be very simple to use. You can literally give them a folder of just HTML, CSS, and JS: https://app.netlify.com/drop

Also, github pages require a public repository (or a pro account), Netlify + github doesn’t

that's a bummer. I thought now that we have private free repos, websites could be hosted there. Still nice feature. I guess, the public nature definitely generates some trust and also is a good way of showing your work as Github works like a project showcase platform too.

You only have to put the static content in the public repo which is no different, visibility-wise, than it is going to be anyway. So who cares?

I keep my "uncompiled" site in a private repo that builds and automatically "deploys" by replacing the contents of the public repo and pushing that up. Source is private, final result is public.

GitHub will build for you if you use Jekyll.

And gitlab will build for you if you tell it how to.

in the case of scar you get to maintain your own AWS infrastructure. Which isn't really the goal of most people wanting a quick static site.

I have always and only used Gitlab Pages, except one test site at Netifly, that too from a Gitlab Repo. Gitlab Pages are super easy, static, need one .yml file, one cname and txt dns record.

GitLab introduced their Pages relatively recently, maybe three years ago. The other two (Netlify and GitHub pages) are a few years older. I also vaguely remember something about it first being available in GitLab's enterprise edition, and later on being ported to the community version.

Not saying that there's anything wrong with it in particular, but it arrived a bit too late to set the standard for anything. People compared it to Netlify even when it was first announced.

Netlify is a great tool, my biggest issue with it (and why I continue to use GitHub Pages) is that the "Global CDN" is a cluster of DigitalOcean nodes, which I don't trust as much as e.g. Fastly in terms of performance and reliability.

(Note: that info is from anecdotally looking at Netlify site IPs, I could be wrong)

In terms of reliability I would trust netlify any day instead of github, they're build to serve sites and github is not.

Was about to say the same. Netlify is far less complicated and free to run a bunch of static sites with low to medium traffic.