Dan Stoakes
At Flaunt, we have experience working on various sites for our clients, using hosting providers such as Netlify, Vercel, WordPress Engine, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Here are some insights into the “traditional” way of web hosting (AWS) and newer web hosting providers (Netlify). Although AWS is older than hosting platforms such as Netlify and Vercel, it still has its uses in the modern scope of web development. This blog will explore the history of web hosting and the pros and cons of AWS and Netlify, so you can find out which one you should use to host your site.
There has been a broad shift in how web applications are built and deployed, transitioning from traditional, infrastructure-heavy approaches to modern, streamlined, serverless models like JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, Markup), driven by the need for simplicity, speed, and scalability in web development.
Amazon Web Services was launched in 2006 and changed the game for cloud computing, offering businesses and developers the chance to rent computing power and storage without having their own physical servers. This enabled companies to build scalable web applications by leveraging a wide range of cloud services. This was great for developers (and coined a new term, Dev Ops!), as it gave flexibility that simply wasn’t available before. However, as the AWS offering grew, so did the complexity, which opened a gap for a way to simplify harnessing cloud technology. This started when Amazon was rapidly growing online selling books, and as the company grew, Amazon engineers realised that different teams within the business kept running into similar problems with scaling and server management.
After creating this server infrastructure for themselves, they decided it would be beneficial to many businesses who struggled to afford and manage large-scale servers, which could often take months to deploy and update, and from here AWS launched its first set of services.
This meant businesses and individuals didn’t need to use old-school server hardware that was costly to buy and maintain. Server hardware would need a dedicated maintainer, was likely to be slower with no back-ups, and was more prone to failure than AWS. However, AWS is a lot more hands-on in comparison to its successor, Netlify, but still less hands-on than the traditional server set-up. Using AWS meant there was also a steeper learning curve in-house for businesses, and for smaller companies, it would be quite costly.
In 2014, AWS introduced AWS Lambda to meet the demands of development teams who wanted to write and deploy code quickly, without specifying an exact server configuration, meaning the cloud provider would do all the scaling and infrastructure management for you.
While these services made “serverless” development possible, they still required AWS configuration and knowledge of several services, making it less accessible for front-end developers and smaller teams who only require quick deployments of their web apps.
As modern web development frameworks gained popularity, the architecture of web applications started to change. Traditional apps began to split into frontend and backend services, which saw the introduction of static site generation, client-side rendering, and serverless functions like JAMstack, which replaced the traditional server-side rendering.
In 2014, Netlify emerged as a platform to meet the needs of modern web development. With static site generators like Gatsby, Netlify focused on deploying static websites that can be built once and served globally through a CDN (Content Delivery Network), enabling fast performance.
Netlify allowed developers to choose a stack and deploy their code quickly, meshing together multiple services and providers, and abstracting away a lot of complexity. Essentially, Dev Ops became simple again!
One problem that was encountered with the first wave of headless websites was that they were client rendering, affecting the ability to crawl the site, which would decrease the SEO ranking. Now most headless sites are server-side rendered so that Google can crawl them with ease, and the load time is much quicker for the user, increasing UX.
Both AWS and modern web development platforms such as Netlify can be useful, but which one works best for you? There is no silver bullet unfortunately, it totally depends on your needs. The following pros and cons should help you decide on your hosting provider for a static website.
Netlify is more simple to use and makes more sense for smaller, static websites. It has good deployment integrations, including form handling and ticketing systems. If you are a Node.js developer looking for a static site with a headless back-end, Netlify is for you.
When using AWS, you need to have an understanding of servers and be willing to dive into the command-line interface (CLI). Dynamic web applications with complex back-ends and a lot of server functionality are not compatible with Netlify, so you would be looking to use AWS or a hosting platform with granular control for something like this.
Essentially, if you want to set up a more simple hosting environment, you can do this with more ease in Netlify than you would in AWS. However, if you need custom infrastructure and a lot of server functionality, AWS is for you.
