What a great question, Ben! Really appreciate the amount of thought you put into it.
Certainly there are workflows where you can deploy a codebase on your client’s servers for review/testing and then on Netlify for the go-live, but that kinda robs you of a lot of the benefits of our platform. You can also do the thing I think you are suggesting: having their server fetch contents from us (proxy to us, though this is fraught with peril and does not come with tech support, see [Support Guide] Why not proxy to Netlify? - better would be to proxy from us to their server if they really needed to do this, since that is well supported and we have features like this one (Rewrites and proxies | Netlify Docs) to ensure that the connection is from us, and to exactly them).
Since your client has such a strong opinion which sounds so strongly held, they might not agree, but these are the selling points I’d use to disabuse them of the notion that hosting things themselves is preferable:
- Netlify has dedicated staff ensuring support, security, uptime and new features. They’d otherwise have to pay their own staff for these things (potentially, in addition to paying you/Netlify, which doesn’t seem to make sense to me). This is kinda a buy it vs build it debate and if they are in the build it camp…well…nothing we do is impossible to replicate, but replicating all of it would take Some Time and especially a ton of effort to maintain - or you’d be paying someone else like GitHub to do it instead.
- our toolset is designed for collaboration. Want to share a copy of the site for review? That’s already built and secured here: Deploy Previews | Netlify Docs . Want to allow a developer to trigger builds automatically? Or a content author? Or a robot? We’ve already built all that. Want easy and programmable access control with SSO (no passwords;
you can sign on with google to edit in the CMS or even browse content using our Identity feature!) Now, we can certainly host a site that pulls data from elsewhere, or builds elsewhere and ships us the result, taking part of the load off Netlify. Many customers choose to do that and we are not here to force you to get locked into our stack (we pride ourselves on extending, not “containing” the ecosystem), but it starts to make me wonder what the client would be gaining from using us at that point. Obviously you like the tool, but if they won’t use it, that’s a bit of a moot point. Perhaps you use the tool to build the site and get their reviews, and then hand them the built site to host themselves? Hard to say what might work for your business, but happy to brainstorm more if you like!
Maybe the most coherent statement I can make is that we are not trying to sell web hosting by itself. We are selling a collaboration tool, and our pricing reflects that: bandwidth is not cheap ($55/100Gb). But, alongside a good collaboration tool, automatic CI, authentication and preview services…we think it can be worthwhile 