This site had been using GitHub Pages for hosting for the past N months. I use Heroku for most of my projects, so paying for a hosting service just for this simple static site felt like a waste of money. Plus, I wanted to give GitHub Pages a go and see how it all worked. It was fine, mostly, except for one massive, glaring issue: If you use a custom domain with GitHub Pages, it’s really not a simple matter to add an SSL certificate and force connection over HTTPS. This has been low-key irritating me for ages, but all of the solutions I’ve found require you to use Cloudflare as a CDN, and I’m trying to avoid relying too heavily on their services.

Anyway, wow, Netlify! It’s amazing. It took me less than five minutes to create an account, trigger a build from my master branch on GitHub and verify that everything worked well before moving my DNS over and adding an SSL certificate. I couldn’t be more impressed. The only final step was renaming my repo on GitHub to disable the link with GitHub Pages. Response times for loading the site have also been slashed by about 80%. If I’d known it would be this easy, I would have done this months ago. It’s so simple I’m tempted to build fun little sites for every random domain I have registered, just to see how fast and easy the setup is with Netlify. So far, I’m an extremely happy customer.