Comment by lloydatkinson
2 years ago
I have been mulling over switching from Netlify to Vercel for a while for my personal site too.
Netlify has weird defaults for everything. It caches almost nothing by default. I had to create a Netlify headers file to tell them that actually yes I would like my CSS, JS, and fonts cached.
Absolutely absurd I had to do that. Even for font files. Because as we all know, the font files change so often that we should never cache them /s
All manner of dumb things like this. Really the only thing keeping me on Netlify is that it has for handling built in. That and fear of changing DNS settings (I use Google domains).
Careful now, if you use Netlify’s _headers to do caching the obvious way, every time you push a new build, some of your users may get a broken site that can only be unfucked by clearing cache. I happened to have written about this problem a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35508640
OK so move to vercel and just dont use Netlify fam
> fear of changing DNS settings
Is that really a thing, with HNers of all people? You just use your registrar's/nameserver operator's web tool to point your DNS name to a new IP. Transferring your DNS to a new registrar might be a bit more involved but is guaranteed to be also possible by domain market regulation. Or maybe it is a problem of cache invalidation and/or lack of control over exact timing of DNS switchover? Or, idk, possibly Google-owned TLDs like .dev require Google Domains as registrar? Or does Google Domains (or GoDaddy or other big registrar) make transferring your domain difficult in a dark pattern way? Doubt it though, if even changing pointed to IPs appears difficult, which however shouldn't be something a registrar would have an interest in making difficult.
> Is that really a thing, with HNers of all people?
You want it to be hitless. Unfortunately DNS can take days to fully propagate and you may not see mistakes until it's too late to fix them. This can cause horrifying outages.
HNers should be respectful of DNS changes and plan accordingly.
I always setup a reverse proxy on the old server that tunnel all TCP traffics on port 80 and 443 to the new server whenever I migrated a website for this reason. Some network really take their time updating their DNS cache, even if your domain has low TTL.
You can change your DNS TTL to let say 5 minutes before you move to new IP. You can change it 3 days before the movement(?).
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Indeed, not sure what the anger in their comment was for.
Given that Netlify has very specific and unusual steps to setup in the first place, yes, it is a concern.
Render.com is a great replacement for both Netlify and Heroku. Check it out, static sites are even free.
> It caches almost nothing by default.
Now I have to go check and see if it's not caching our fonts. Geez, I just assumed...
> fear of changing DNS settings
I recently had to migrate DNS to Cloudflare to stop a 40,000 QPS DDoS attack. DNS migration was slow, but painless. As long as you plan accordingly and set up the new destination in advance, it should be fine. Hosting DNS at a DNS provider will give you extra flexibility in the future.
Yeah, it's absurd. Every page load the fonts were sent again.
I use google domains for dns too, just with netlify as the host.