Netlify has strict limits in their TOS on what you are allowed to host there. There’s lots of legal content that you might want to publish that you aren’t allowed to put on Netlify.
Additionally, their uploader CLI is spyware, and their corporate stance on this is that you agreed to their uploader tool spying on you when you created your Netlify account.
They also can’t pull from private git hosting, only the big public ones (which are themselves ethically questionable), which makes using Netlify for builds a bit of an issue if you, for example, self host Gitea or GitLab.
I use a PaaS (sort of a self-hosted Heroku) called CapRover that pulls/builds from a self-hosted Gitea on branch change. It’s a relatively small change to drop a two-stage Dockerfile into an jekyll/hugo repo that does the build in step one then copies only the resulting static files into a totally off the shelf/vanilla nginx container in stage 2 for runtime hosting.
For my main website, I still have cloudflare in front of that.
It silently uploads your usage data without consent, which includes your IP and thus coarse location data as well as any vendor relationships you use it within (eg hosting or CI).
It even sent a “telemetry disabled” telemetry event when/after you explicitly indicated you didn’t want telemetry sent, until I repeatedly complained (they brushed it off initially): https://github.com/netlify/cli/issues/739
I just don’t believe that the company has any meaningful training or priorities around privacy.
As for the types of content you can’t post, I encourage you to peruse their TOS:
> Content with the sole purpose of causing harm or inciting hate, or content that could be reasonably considered as slanderous or libelous.
I personally would like to be able to post political cartoons or other political content expressing and inciting hate toward, for example, violent or inhuman ideologies, and those would be posted for the express purpose of causing harm and damage to the political campaigns they target.
Netlify should not be policing legal, political speech on their platform.
You also aren’t allowed to host files over 10MB(!) so that rules out hosting your own music, podcasts, high res photography, most types of software downloads, or videos on your website, all pretty normal/standard things to host on a website in 2020.
I'm also using this, and now that I need some dynamic stuff to allow booking me in my calendar, I found that I also get simple access to aws lambdas for free, way enough for little me.
