Kev Quirk

If It's Free, You're The Product

18 Dec 2020

There's an old saying in tech circles, which goes something along the lines of:

On the Internet, if a product is free, you're the product.

I recently switched from WordPress to Jekyll and hosting is now provided by the free tier of Netlify. It's a great service that automatically builds and deploys my site whenever I do a git push.

I can't help but think about the quote above though - am I the product here? Should I be paying for my static site hosting? Netlify offer a pro tier, but it's $19/month, which is more than I'd care to pay for hosting.

Maybe I should consider another hosting provider, like AWS Amplify, Digital Ocean's App Platform or God forbid the newly announced Cloudflare pages.

I still have my trusty VPS with Ionos (albeit recently migrated from CentOS to Ubuntu, because, you know, reasons). Maybe I could come up with a way of automatically deploying my site from Git using my VPS - Plesk already has Git integration, so maybe it would be trivial.

I should look into that.

What do you think, dear reader? By using Netlify's free hosting tier, am I the product here?

← The one before
Add A Date To Your Posts!

Up next →
My Writing Workflow

Reply to this post

If you have thoughts on anything I've covered in this post, please use the button below to send me an email so we can have a good old chat about it.

Reply by email

Enjoyed this post?

I put a lot of work into maintaining this site and I really enjoy interacting with my readers.

My fuel of choice is coffee, so if you did enjoy this post, or found it in any way useful, I'd appreciate more fuel to keep me going. ❤️

Buy me a coffee