I am fan of using GitHub Pages and Netlify for building and hosting my Jekyll static sites remotely, for free.
There is no best choice for all situations. I use a mix of both and I hope you will too.
I am going to briefly cover how Netlify and GitHub Pages can be used, then in follow-up posts in this series I'll cover reason to use one of the other.
Summary
If you need a simple no-frills setup without leaving GitHub, especially if you have hobby project sites, then use GitHub Pages. You can always add GitHub Actions or move to Netlify, if you need more flexibility.
If you want more control (over packages, the build flow, logging and add-on plugins) and especially if it the site is for a client or company, then use Netlify.
About
Here are the two services under review:
- Netlify homepage.
- GitHub Pages feature page.
They both have generous build limits on the free tier and will build from a GitHub repo.
Hosting URLs
Your custom URL will look like this on each service:
my-app.netlify.appmy-username.github.io/my-app/
Here is one of Netlify sites michael-currin.netlify.app/ and here is one of my Jekyll sites michaelcurrin.github.io/coding-blog/.
You can rename your Netlify app to anything that another user has not already taken.
While the GitHub Pages site's path will be named after your repo. But, you are allowed to have on repo like this: michaelcurrin.github.io.
Both Netlify and GH Pages allow you to hook up a custom domain that you already own as your domain at no further cost. Such as example.com.
Next
Continue to the posts in this series to see motivations for GitHub Pages and then Netlify.
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