Hosting with ZEIT

GitHub Pages is awesome. In fact, that’s what this site is hosted on. It’s easy, it’s free. What’s not to love? So when I thought about refreshing our website at Vihanti Digital Services, I assumed that’s what I’d use as well.

Then, thanks to @myobie, I heard about ZEIT Now. Goodness. It’s amazing! They provide free hosting for smaller sites as well, and it’s fully integrated with git, just like Github Pages. In addition, though, they provide a full continuous deployment framework. Each pull request gets automatically deployed to a new URL. This means that deploying to prod is just an instantaneous switch. They also provide syntax highlighted logs, so you can see what’s going on during a deployment. Beautiful!

Netlify is another similar service that also looks great. I haven’t tried it (yet!), but I’m impressed by their addon features. For example, they support contact forms that automatically populate within the dashboard. No third-party service needed! In the meantime, I’m quite happy with formspree.io. It does everything I need.