Hmm, you right. You could also build a Dropbox clone yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
But Dropbox is something for laymen and casual consumers, it had a massive convenience quotient — Dokku and Netlify (and surge.sh and Heroku, etc) are for developers specifically, and git pushing to website generator is more or less the same experience with all of those services. There isn’t a gulf of difference between using Netlify and creating a Dokku droplet on DigitalOcean...
Edit: comment below helped me too, CDN, SSL, pretty URLs. All good value with Netlify. Thanks.
> There isn’t a gulf of difference between using Netlify and creating a Dokku droplet
There absolutely is.
There might be one click deployment for tools as DO droplets, but if you're the target user for that kind of thing, you're probably taking on more responsibility than you're even understanding. It might even be that the one click setup has good security defaults and automatic updates set up. It might continue to work without any issue and any intervention for a long time, but by luck/coincidence. On netlify it will continue to work because someone is taking care of the things that need to be taken care of, not because of luck/coincidence.
Another perspective: You're a JS/HTML/CSS developer. Heartbleed happens. On netlify, you don't even need to pay attention. On DO you at the very least need to understand how to check that all your servers are updated.
Another perspective: I've managed linux servers before. I know how to do it. I don't enjoy it.
Yes, you could do all of that or just sign up for a Netlify account, create a site, add your shared key and hit "git push". SSL, CDN, etc. all included.
Not to degrade the mention... I've done a lot of the same with Dokku on DO before. There's plugins for Let's Encrypt and some other bids. CDN, haven't worried about it too much, have used Cloudflare in front of a few sites, ymmv though.
Netlify is definitely on my todo/reading list... I just tore down my personal website and blog, with the intent of getting it running elsewhere. For my blog, I exported all the details into markdown files with front matter, but hadn't done anything to get it re-published anywhere. So, who knows.
I have a genuine interest in exploring a lot of this, but motivation + time have been limiting factors for me.
I had the same issue with motivation + time but I already had my site setup/building via hugo. One day I said enough and I looked into it. In about 10 minutes I had it all setup with ssl, my custom domain, etc.
