5 Reasons to consider using Netlify to host your static site
Abdulahi Roble / October 17, 2019
3 min read
There was a time when hosting a website used to be complicated and quite expensive.
Luckily we now have different services like Netlify, which makes deploying websites a seamless experience.
1. Hosting & Price
Properly the best thing about Netlify is its different plans and what they offer in terms of perks. For example, they have a starter plan which offers:
- Custom domains & HTTPS
- Instant Git integration
- Continuous deployment
- Deploy previews
And the total cost of all that comes down to zero. Hosting is done through a CDN, which speeds up website performance significantly.
2. Easy to use dashboard
The dashboard gives you a good overview of everything from deploys to previews, and it is just overall easy to navigate if you want to make some changes on your site.
3. Great documentation
Netlifys documentation is very comprehensive and easy to understand.
They have sections that range from configuring builds to setting up your custom domain, which I from the beginning had some problems with, but thanks to the documentation were able to resolve quickly.
Also, the documentation has recently been updated so that it now becomes even more self-explanatory. You can check it out here:
Get started
4. Form submission
Setting up a form using Netlify is a straightforward process that includes nothing more than adding this piece of code at the beginning of your form tag:
data-netlify="true"
Previously if you wanted to add a form to your website, you had to use server-side code like PHP or JavaScript. It also comes with a default success page after the form has been submitted, or you can create your own one.
All successful form submissions will show up in your dashboard, and you can even integrate it with your email using Zappier, which is an integration tool.
With the starter plan, you can make up to 100 form submissions per month, which should be enough if it is just your portfolio site. If not, then you can always upgrade to a level 1 account, but that does cost, however.
5. Continuous deployment
Another great feature is its continuous deployment, which links to your repository, and every time you push your code, Netlify runs a build tool and deploys the result.
