Corporate or marketing sites often times don’t need full blast content management systems. It’s also nice to have the marketing site on a different server than the web application. After doing a side project that uses Jekyll and Cloud Cannon for the CMS it got me thinking on setting up an easy to use jekyll site. Since these sites don’t get updated often, and when they do, it’s often by a developer, we don’t need a CMS. Writing basic HTML will work just fine.
While browsing the Jekyll documentation they mention Netlify. To my surprise they offer a free plan that even includes SSL with Lets Encrypt.
They offer the ability to use forms, their DNS servers, and even add custom environment variables when building your site.
As for their git providers, they support Github, Bitbucket as well as Gitlab (hosted). When pushing code to the repository on the master branch, it will automatically pick it up and rebuild the site.
If you are interested in static sites without the mess of a database, or long load times on lousy oversold WordPress shared hosting, checkout Netlify.
*Note: There is no referral links nor paid advertising. I personally use them and think they are a great choice for sites that don’t change a whole lot. Often times people jump to WordPress, Joomla, etc because they are easy to setup and not necessarily the right tool.*