I've been using Static hosting services for a few years now, starting with GitHub pages as soon as I got my head around it. It's been good enough to host some small production sites and does a fine job.

I've played around with Zeit and Surge but never got as far as having a real website up and running.

I've heard about Netlify for quite a while but it wasn't until I heard Phil Hawksworth at Frontend United in May of this year that I knew I was really missing out.

I bought my own .ie domain name alanburke.ie a while back but it only served a redirect to cycletraffic - it was time to get something up there.

Not being blessed with design skills I took a simple template from html5up and tweaked it for my own use.

So what did it take?

The site is just a static html page, and doesn't make use of a statc site generator just yet, so I committed the code and pushed to a public github repo.

Next, over to Netlify to add a free account, and setup a new site. I was prompted to allow Netflify access to the freshly created GitHub repo - a seamless process - and the only configuration required was to specify which folder under the git root contained the actual web page.

That was it - the site was instantly available at a Netlify URL.

Lastly, I just needed to wire up the DNS configuration for the custom domain.

And what do I get?

Each deployments, Super-fast hosting and custom domain with SSL cert. And I haven't put my hand in my pocket yet. There's a lot to love.

Of course, I'm not making much use of the power of Netlify yet, but you have to start somewhere.