Moving from Now to Netlify then back to Now

I am a massive fan of both Vercel’s Now.sh platform and the Netlify platform.

This post has been in my drafts since the beginning of March 2019. At that time it was titled ‘Moving from Now to Netlify’ and it was mostly me being salty about the configuration of the Now service.

At that time I had fallen for Netlify and was swooning over it’s super simple deployments and domain management. That along with it’s awesome caching making your Lighthouse audits something you’d boast about on Twitter.

Yeah, those people are the worst!

Ha! Yes, guilty!

Anyhoo! Like the fickle Twitter driven web developer I am, switching technology every week is expected! 😂

So now I’m back in the Now.sh camp. Why? I could say it’s because I prefer the new name change from ZEIT to Vercel.

It’s not, I could say that it’s because Vercel has massively upped their game in the last two years. They have but it’s not that either.

Netlify is an awesome platform and I love working with it, I’d absolutely recommend it to anyone.

I like to the convenience of being able to switch at between them, so if I decide I want to go with x platform I can up and move relatively quickly with no downtime.

Vercel’s Now.sh platform is also a CDN

I’m going through all the assets in posts on here and adding them with the Now CLI so I can use a link to them directly, or through a service like Images.weserv.nl for further optimisations.

I know that Gatsby will optimise images on the fly for best sizes I’m doing this as a learning exercise as much as was to improve performance.

I’ll probably be back on Netlify or the next new hotness by the time you’re reading this!

What I’ve learned

Try to keep things with as little lock in as possible so you can truly utilise the content mesh.

The irony here is that I’ve completely flip flopped from one back to the other but as I have my domains with Namecheap all I need to do is change the DNS configuration and we’re done!

In the past I purchased some domains with Vercel but if I wanted to move then I’d need to migrate the domain or at lease configure the DNS with the Now CLI.

Domain management with Vercel Now CLI is something that I have always been ok managing. I did find the Netlify console just as straightforward to use but if you find the terminal a bit daunting for something like this then Vercel now have a DNS integration that makes it a lot more visual.