Netlify

There is a new tool that I’ve added to my blogging toolbox and it’s called Forestry. It’s a pretty nifty idea - keep creating your site using Hugo or Jekyll static generators and keep it nice, fast and tidy and safe from PHP problems of Worpress and friends, but add another layer - a CMS. This CMS is a very light one. It’s aware of the static generators, it can read your site’s existing structure without a hickup and you can connect it to your Git repository to integrated into your existing workflow.

I was looking for a free hosting solution for my small SPA experiments, the blog and a landing page. I’ve experimented with zeithq now.sh , Google’s firebase.com and Surge and each had their issues. Now.sh - doesn’t allow custom domains on free plan. Shows source code, have to re-alias on each deploy, performance was surprisingly bad (considering they describe their service as having SPDY HTTP/2 support, CDN and auto scaling) Firebase - can only host one app on a domain, otherwise - SSL breaks and you cannot use it anymore.