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Waylon Walker
Waylon Walker

Posted on • Originally published at waylonwalker.com on

Should I switch to Zeit Now

Netlify

I have happily had my personal site waylonwalker.com hosted on netlify for nearly 2 years now. In fact I have hosted about a dozen different toy projects to play with on there, 4 of which have gone far enough to get a custom domain name. They are fast to deploy and consistently do so on every git push to master.

Zeit

I have recently started playing with zeit again. I really like their cli tool, its dead simple and makes sense. I tried the netlify one early on and dont think I really gave it much of a chance. I was able to backup a site we were modifying by saving everything locally (literally control+s) and running now in the command line.

While I was on the site I realized that when switching to gatsby v2 I had deployed it to now.sh while testing, before cutting over to the updated one on netlify. It has been building every version since without issue!

It has been building every version since without issue!

What I am using

  • gatsby
  • forestry.io

I am using gatsby to build my site, and I do use forestry.io as a cms to be able to edit/manage posts online. I think forestry is part of my problem in that it has added extra builds. Every time I upload an image or save a post, even a draft, it pushes to production.

Why Switch

This is just a side hobby for me. I do not make any $$ off of it, and I do not want to pay for anything I do not have to. As I am stepping up my blogging I have already hit 50% of my build quota only 1 week into the month on netlify. I really like what netlify is doing for the JAMstack community, but I would rather build everything locally and push to GHPages for this project than have to pay for it.

Check out the second part of this series

What Are your suggestions

Do you use Zeit?

Where do you host your gatsby.js site?

Top comments (2)

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ganonbit profile image
Andrew Reese

If it's an issue of hitting build time due to gatsby's method of builds (until they get the incremental builds rolled out) then zeit might be a good fit for sure. It's simple and inside of zeit's dashboard you can have it set to when you push to master, it pushes to zeit for you similar to the same feature netlify has for that. Zeit is very reliable, but their dashboard is a little less user friendly than netlify, in my opinion. But you can get your custom domain setup on there relatively fast.

Another option which is very new could be trying out Gatsby Cloud (gatsbyjs.com/pricing/) but I personally havent given it a shot yet.

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waylonwalker profile image
Waylon Walker

Thanks for the suggestion! I checked out gatsbyjs.com and it is amazing. I deployed my site there with very little effort. I have to say their dashboard is quite wonderful. Lighthouse is built right in and there is a bit more insight to things I could do better inside my gatsby project. I dont think 30/month will fit my current workflow. I think I could either switch to putting my cms on a dev branch and do a PR when everything is ready, or just switch to completely a manual deploy. Either can be achieved with netlify as well without needing to transfer. Zeit is still intriguing because I can just let the cms push everything to master without issue or any extra thought on my behalf.