General note: This site’s appearance, configuration, hosting, and other basic considerations will change over time. As a result, certain content on this page could be at variance with what you’re currently seeing on the site, but the two were consistent when this post originally appeared.
Welcome to a story about an ending — and a beginning.
A few days ago, I posted about how a user of Netlify, on which I launched this site in September, 2018, could work around the Netlify free tier’s monthly limit of 300 build minutes. I also mentioned that one other option was simply to find a different host with fewer restrictions.
However, I didn’t suggest that course of action to you, mostly because changing hosts is a big deal. It can be fraught with potential perils at worst and headache-inducing inconveniences at best, especially if you’ve never done it before. And that doesn’t even account for all the time and work you have to spend in figuring out which host to pick.
In that same vein, I did mention that I’d been spending “time, research, testing, and tinkering” as I considered possible answers to the build-minutes issue. To be sure, my suggested solution — using scripting on GitHub or GitLab to do builds on those sites, instead, and then deploy them to Netlify — required those efforts. However, it was by no means the only reason I made those mental investments.
Before I go on, let’s think for a minute about two things.
First, there was Apple’s recent WWDC 2020 announcement that the Mac line of computers would transition from Intel CPUs to Apple Silicon. Apple executive Craig Federighi revealed that all the new macOS features he’d been showing up to that point had actually been running the entire time on Macs with, yep, Apple CPUs.1
Second, there long ago was a series of television commercials about Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid. The “plot” (?) usually involved a manicurist telling her customer about how gently this product treated one’s hands. Then, when the customer expressed doubt about the claim, the manicurist would say, “You’re soaking in it.”
Well . . .
This site has been running on a new host for several days. So, if you’ve been here fairly recently, you’ve been soaking in it.
Yeah, I explained in that last post how to stay with Netlify; but, in the process of researching other choices, I learned some things that made me decide to take this site elsewhere.
Don’t let the door hit me?
To be sure, Netlify’s free tier has a ton to offer, so I was determined that the move not be a downgrade in any way. As I researched and tested, I decided I wanted my site’s next host to have these five capabilities to which I’d become accustomed with Netlify:
- A reasonably well-performing free tier, but with considerably more leniency where monthly builds are concerned.
- A top-quality content delivery network (CDN) in front of it.
- Relatively easy — and, ideally, automatic — deploys from my choice of online Git repository.
- The option to deploy also (not only) via a command-line interface (CLI)2 if the circumstances ever demand it.
- Brotli compression, which is even more efficient than the gzip (the smaller the delivered content, the faster the web pages load) that pretty much any host offers.
Armed with these “must-haves,” I spent several days checking out other vendors known for extra-special-quality hosting of static sites. In the end, the choice came down to three: Google’s Firebase; the fast-rising Render; and Vercel (formerly called ZEIT).
Firebase
Despite the obvious advantages of Google’s wealth backing it and its popularity in the dev community (albeit mainly among database guys, it seems), Firebase — whose free “Spark” tier allows far more use in a month than I’d ever accumulate — fell short for two reasons.
First, it lacks Brotli and, if you do a search for “firebase brotli,” you’ll find several comments from Firebase personnel indicating it’s not in the current roadmap, although Google’s Addy Osmani hopes that’ll change.
Second, CLI-based deployment is Firebase’s only method. While that’s fine from the desktop Mac (and, I admit, good and geeky fun at times), I sometimes want to push a change from my iPhone or iPad with Working Copy.
The only thing that kept Firebase in the evaluation process till nearly the end is that it’s got the wicked-quick and ultra-consistent Fastly CDN in front of it. It half-tempted me to go back to my days of running sites off a $2.50/month VPS which I’d then put behind Fastly, but that’s more trouble than I want to handle on a regular basis. Been there, done that.
Note, 2020-09-09: Firebase now supports Brotli; and using CI/CD similar to what I described here for Netlify can allow a more automated workflow with Firebase. Still, my continued testing shows it comes up a bit short against other considered options.
Render
Render was hard to turn down. There is a lot of smart thinking behind it, it’s young and eager, and my tests showed its results to be pretty impressive in not just speed but also consistency. It’s going to be one to watch in this “space” in the next two or three years. I gave Render a lot of thought, especially given that its free tier for static sites allows 100 GB of up/down bandwidth per month with no other deploy limits at all. (I’m sure Render would gently rein you in if you got crazy with the quantity of deployments, but I’d never be in danger of that.)
Unfortunately, some of Render’s DX (developer experience) — notably the documentation — is still somewhat lacking; my testing showed some inconsistencies in CDN performance as compared to the others; and there’s no CLI as yet, although I learned June 28 that one is planned (no ETA). This vendor will get better, and I’ll probably give it another look-see before too terribly long. Right now, however, I don’t think it’s quite ready for how I want to use it.
That said, I do encourage you to check it out; you may find Render perfectly fine for your own needs. It’s definitely a “comer.” Keep your eyes on it.
Vercel
Best known as the preeminent host for Next.js-based websites and apps but now branching out with better support for SSGs3, Vercel ticked all my boxes. Since I’ve also experimented a little with Next.js and admire the thinking and team behind that platform, I already had a good feeling about Vercel.
The case for Vercel became even stronger when I found an article which indicated that Vercel’s network performance vs. that of Netlify’s was more consistent. Of course, that was referring to each vendor’s paid-tier hosting, so it was apples and oranges.
Nonetheless, my own checks across several days and in multiple sites’ online tests showed that even the Vercel free tier’s performance was, indeed a tad more consistent than Netlify’s — and equally as fast (sometimes slightly more so) when the two were at their respective bests.
Compared to Netlify’s free tier, Vercel’s is significantly more generous. As of this past April, Vercel’s free “Hobby” plan allows up to 100 deployments per day, with no mention of minutes at all. As with Render’s monthly bandwidth cap of 100 GB, I’m sure there’s still a limit to what one would be allowed to do — i.e, how much data one could pump — with that many deployments. Nonetheless, there’s no question that will be more than enough capacity for this site going forward, perhaps indefinitely.
By the way: Vercel has stepped up its game on handling various SSGs. When I connected it to my GitHub repo, it auto-detected this was an Eleventy-based site and suggested several likely default settings, such as the _site folder as the location of the generated site. Very cool. All I had to do was add my webmention.io token, and I was good to go.
When compared to not only Netlify but also other vendors I tested by actually setting up my content on them, Vercel handled the build process the best.4 In fact, Vercel’s setup runs my build-time imgxfm.js image-processing script twice as quickly.5 I don’t know what kind of hardware Vercel is running but, man, I like that kind of build performance.
Finally, I simply preferred the Vercel DX, especially the developer UI, over that of either the increasingly cluttered Netlify or the getting-there-but-not-there-yet Render — not to mention the you-better-have-time-to-read-a-lot-of-docs Firebase.
So, on June 30, this site moved to Vercel.
I should note also that my site analytics didn’t miss a beat, thanks to my recent decision to convert the site to the totally portable Fathom Analytics6 from Netlify’s servers-locked offering.
Leaving is always a bit weird
One afternoon over two decades ago, I was standing at the wall of my cubicle at a company where I’d spent several years and made many friends and acquaintances. I was about to head to a better-paying job elsewhere, and the two weeks’ notice I’d given for that departure was in its final hour. I had finished all the wrap-up, handing-off to others, and the like; so now, truly with nothing to do but wait for it to be the hour when I’d leave that office for the last time, I looked back across the rows of other cubicles, watching as the other folks went about their jobs as usual.
Happy though I was about the pay raise and opportunity the new job was about to give me7, as I took in that view I had an eerie feeling in the pit of my stomach combined with a sudden realization of “And now this will all go on without me.”
So it was a strange, déjà vu-ish moment for me earlier this week when, after I confirmed the site was up and running worldwide on Vercel, I deleted my site’s content from the Netlify instance where it had lived since September 23, 2018.8 My little site was only one of untold multitudes on Netlify, so I’m sure Netlify couldn’t care less (especially since my site generated zero dollars for Netlify other than the nine-buck-a-month Netlify Analytics subscription), but — even as it felt good to arrive at Vercel, and I’m really liking it so far — the finality of it all gave me more pause than I’d expected. It was oddly reminiscent of when one moves out of one’s parents’ home for the last time, in a way I can’t truly explain.
But don’t get me wrong: leaving one place is followed by arriving at another — with the thrill of that first moment in a new place, a realization that you’re starting over with all the opportunities that presents.
Thank you, Netlify, for twenty-one-and-a-half good and interesting months as my home on the web. I am sure you will continue to be a great place for static sites to live, especially where site owners are just getting started.
And thank you, Vercel, for your warm welcome, and for the interesting journey on which we’ve embarked this week. I look forward to watching your already strong capabilities get even more impressive over time. Building upon the high performance of your platform, I hope to make this site a better place for nice folks to spend some time and learn a thing or two.
Note: To be continued.
This was, as all we old Mac geeks recognized, an homage to what the late Steve Jobs did in the 2005 event when he announced the transition from PowerPC CPUs to Intel CPUs. In an attempt to allay developers’ concerns about how smoothly Apple could execute such a massive change, Jobs joked that the Mac had “been living a double life” for years — that is, a dedicated team had been secretly developing Intel-compatible Mac hardware and OS versions, just in case such a transition ever became necessary — and that the Mac with which he’d worked since the show’s beginning was, indeed, running on an Intel CPU. ↩︎
While failure to have a CLI isn’t a show-stopper by itself, the advantages I found for that in the getting-around-Netlify post showed the availability of a CLI to be a worthwhile “want.” Ya never know . . . ↩︎
Next.js isn’t an SSG, although it can do that sort of thing, particularly since the release of Next.js 9.3. ↩︎
There’s no way to compare this to how Firebase works, by the way, because you do its builds on a separate system — whether that’s your own computer or, say, GitHub or GitLab. ↩︎
Indeed, I took advantage of Vercel’s added oomph to raise the quality of the original images from which my build creates responsive images, after seeing this Twitter conversation. That said, the move to Cloudinary rendered that consideration moot, as the 2020-07-31 addendum to this post explains. ↩︎
Affiliate link. If you use it to get started with Fathom, you’ll receive a $10 credit on your first invoice and I’ll get a commission. ↩︎
I would end up staying there for nearly seventeen years and might still be there to this day, had a nasty budget cut not ended that part of my career. ↩︎
I originally wrote here that the site’s launch date was September 19, 2018; but in November, 2022, when I downloaded my Twitter archive, I found the following in a tweet from exactly 4:13 PM on Sunday, September 23, 2018 (U.S. CDT): “It’s still propagating (as is the SSL cert to make your browser happy with it), but my new personal site will be up shortly: http://brycewray.com. Be kind. It’s young.” (Later, of course, that would be https://, thank you very much.) ↩︎
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