What I love about Gatsby Cloud
Recently, I have been migrating my projects away from Netlify to Gatsby Cloud. The reason why I decided to make the switch was fairly simple. Both my projects are built on Gatsby.js. What better choice than to move a service specifically designed for Gatsby.js? So far, I am extremely impressed with Gatsby Cloud.
Faster build times
Gatsby Cloud (free tier) has been significantly faster than Netlify in my experience. Whereas one of my projects took 11m 24s to build on Netlify, the same project only took 3m 22s on Gatsby Cloud. This blew me away. With additional features like incremental builds, I can see their service scaling quite nicely with my needs. If you want to learn more about incremental builds, LogRocket has a great article about it.
Automatic Lighthouse Reports
Lighthouse is an automated tool by Google that evaluates the quality of your webpage. The tool runs various tests like performance, accessibility, SEO, etc. Gatsby Cloud automatically creates a lighthouse report on every deployment. You can easily see how changes in your code have affected things like performance, accessibility, and general web best practices.
Automated SSL Certificates
Gatsby Cloud will automatically provision SSL certificates for your website through Let’s Encrypt. There is little to no configuration necessary here. Just point update your DNS record to point to your Gatsby Cloud instance and it will do the rest.
Switching took less than 5 minutes
The two projects I have are pure Gatsby.js projects. They don’t utilize a CMS or need any plugins. For projects like this, the switch was extremely simple. After creating an account, allow access to your GitHub account, select the repo, and select a deploy branch. Gatsby will then automatically pick up everything and deploy your site. Way to make a great first impression Gatsby Cloud.
It also has a free tier
Just like Netlify, it also has a free tier. The free tier is pretty comparable to Netlify’s. It gives you 100GB of bandwidth and 5M requests per month. Build speeds are considered “Average” but still significantly faster than Netlify. There’s also no monthly allowance for build times, which is a nice bonus here.
Wrap Up
Gatsby Cloud is still pretty new but it has given me a very positive impression. I am excited to see what the Gatsby.js team will bring to the platform.
