Software Engineer

I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.

I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!

I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.

Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.

Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.

With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

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78 upvotes9 comments3.4M views
Yaron Levi
Yaron Levi
December 6th 2018 at 8:34AM

How Netlify compared to Surge, Zeit now or other? Have you looked at other alternatives?

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Johnny Bell
Johnny Bell
December 6th 2018 at 4:58PM

Hey Yaron, I've only tried Netlify and Heroku. I'll have to checkout Surge and Zeit. Whats your experience with them?

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Vincent Du
Vincent Du
December 6th 2018 at 4:27PM

Netlify is the very one what I need now.

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Johnny Bell
Johnny Bell
December 6th 2018 at 4:59PM

Hey Vincent, yes Netlify is great. Let me know if you need any help getting it up and running.

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Ganesa Vijayakumar
Ganesa Vijayakumar
February 13th 2019 at 1:23PM

Hi Johnny, I'm using Heroku for my personal application deployment. do you advise me to jump into using Netlify or stay in Heroku itself?

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Johnny Bell
Johnny Bell
February 13th 2019 at 5:22PM

Hey Ganesa, It really depends on your needs. I found that Heroku actually has way to many features that I didn't need or even know what they were. Whereas Netlify was very simple to setup and get going with everything I needed right out of the box, and its free.

If your app is simple enough and can live on the JAMstack then I suggest switching to Netlify, its a set it and forget it tool, when you push to master it just deploys. However if you need more functionality with your deployment process, and app its best to use Heroku.

If you look at my decisions I also wrote about switching from Netlify to AWS if you're interested - I would link you however we don't currently offer linking in decisions at StackShare 馃榾.

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Ganesa Vijayakumar
Ganesa Vijayakumar
March 4th 2019 at 3:31PM

Much appreciated. Thanks for your genial suggestions. :)

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Johnny Bell

Software Engineer