When we launched Gatsby Cloud a year ago, our focus was to dramatically improve the experience for both engineers and marketers. How could we minimize build times? How to make creating and editing content on Gatsby sites feel practically instant? We made important strides toward these goals with the launch of Incremental Builds on Cloud, Deploy Previews, CMS Previews, intelligent asset caching, and more.
But there was a piece of the puzzle still to be solved: hosting. Deploying a Gatsby site to a user’s network of choice was fraught with challenges, particularly around consistency. Sites deploying once a week were perhaps less impacted, but those deploying 25 times a day often experienced problems like deployments taking a very long time to go live, or even simply failing. The handoff between the blazing-fast builds of Gatsby Cloud to outside hosting solutions that delivered inconsistent quality were preventing Gatsby users from capturing peak speed and reliability — and left us desiring much, much more.
It was time to own the full website workflow…To create the perfect end-to-end platform for the ultimate Gatsby experience.
Enter The Edge
Gatsby Cloud is custom-architected to deliver a fully performant Gatsby experience like no other platform can. Adding a secure global edge network powered by Fastly was the way to experience the speed at both deployment time and when serving content to our end users. We are proud to say that hosting your Gatsby website on Gatsby Cloud gives you the fastest and most reliable way to go from idea to production.
Gatsby Hosting allows for deployments that are noticeably faster than our customers were previously seeing when chaining their cloud tools together, particularly for larger sites. We chose to partner with Fastly to help serve Gatsby content at the absolute edge — closest to your users.
We also added a “host” of other developer and admin features in Gatsby Cloud to make managing your websites simple: custom domains, SSL certificates, and Workspaces.
Unifying the Gatsby experience
With the addition of hosting on a world-class edge network, Gatsby Cloud now offers a full end-to-end platform to help developers and marketers alike to build, deploy, and manage excellent user experiences powered by Gatsby. The unified interface reduces complexity and increases the security and productivity of your organization — all while delivering fast, consistent build and deploy times.
Hosting was the final step to achieving founder Kyle Mathews’ original vision for Gatsby as a complete solution for building Jamstack websites: Directly connecting the dots of creating inherently fast, scalable and secure sites with Gatsby open source framework, then building them to fullest (and fastest) potential with Incremental Builds on Gatsby Cloud before deploying to a best in class global edge network with Gatsby Hosting. “Gatsby was one of the first serverless-native website frameworks,” he says. “I’ve loved watching developers build complex serverless applications with Gatsby open source, and optimize their builds on Gatsby Cloud. I’m thrilled to make this powerful paradigm even more approachable for developers by offering hosting as the final step in a unified Gatsby workflow.”
Gatsby Hosting makes it easier than ever to build the modern web. Finally, all the pieces are here, working together for our ultimate goal: Making Gatsby the best dev environment and the best content creator end-to-end workflow…With the fastest builds, fastest deploys, and a Fastly-powered global edge network.
10x-ing the Gatsby experience
The benefits of hosting any site on Gatsby Cloud include:
- Millisecond load times. Combine Fastly’s globally-distributed delivery network with custom-built infrastructure designed just for Gatsby to see just how fast “blazing fast” can be.
- Flexible plans. Gatsby is committed to making the web accessible for all, and Gatsby Cloud Hosting is free for small projects. Business users will find a range of tiers providing professional-grade value for even the smallest orgs all the way to custom Enterprise solution packages for large companies with complex site needs.
- Simple to deploy. With just a few clicks, users can go from code to production — complete with a live, custom URL.
- Global points of presence. Gatsby Hosting leverages Fastly’s powerful, strategically placed global POPs, which allow for more content to be served from cache. This improves content delivery speeds and results in even better user experiences.
- Built-in security. All sites on Gatsby Cloud Hosting are served with free, automatically-generated TLS certificates to ensure the secure delivery of your content.
We are proud of all our launches, but Gatsby Hosting feels particularly special. We have always believed that activating the future of how the web is built would mean empowering developers and marketers to collaborate to build, deploy and update a website in one simple end-to-end workflow…And making your content available to users around the globe in seconds.
Now, that future is here.
Wait, there’s more! We have more exciting product announcements and launches today as part of our first-ever GatsbyConf, including a brand new Gatsby version 3.0.
To learn more about the newest Gatsby Cloud capabilities, register for our upcoming webinar “Achieving the Optimal Web Experience by Hosting in Gatsby Cloud” on March 23, 2021. Be sure to check them out!