Congrats to the Divshot crew. For those who are looking for an alternative and comfortable on the command line, you can try out surge.sh. Custom domain's are free and we are 100% bootstrapped. Open to your feedback.
Divshot co-founder here. Firebase Hosting is opinionated in being HTTPS-only, and we automatically provision an SSL certificate for your custom domain. The cost of doing so is the reason we're unable to offer custom domains for free.
[Firebase Cofounder] The reason <your_app>.firebaseapp.com sites are free and custom domains are $5/mo with Firebase Hosting is HTTPS-only. Our cost-of-goods-sold includes auto-provisioning the SSL cert for the domain.
Part of our philosophy is providing services that work well, and hopefully better, together. Our realtime database only accepts SSL connections and doing the same with Hosting means when you build on Firebase your whole app is encrypted by default.
We're excited to use Divshot's tech make Firebase Hosting even better going forward.
Co-founder of netlify here. We're getting hit pretty heavily right now, with links to people asking for what alternatives to divshot exists, and what you need from a hosting service that specializes in static sites and apps.
So thought I'd post here both congratulating James and Divshot, and secondly (of course) tell a bit about our service, and what we think a hosting service for static site should be able to provide.
At netlify we have a multilayered CDN, which makes us faster than anyone else at the moment. At the same time it enables us to have true instant cache invalidation. That means that your changes to a static site is live in 1 second, but only the affected files get invalidated - the rest stays cached. All deploys are atomic, and there's never a chance end users will browse an broken version of your site.
We also do continuous deployment. That means every time you push to git (GitHub, GitLabs, BitBucket or your selfhosted git-repo), we automatically build and deploy the new version of your site. It doesn't matter if you use static site generators or build tools like grunt, gulp, Ember CLI, etc...
Besides this we have a ton of features like API proxying, rewrites and redirect rules, HTTP2, SSL (both SNI and full), staging sites, password protection, DNS hosting, Geo IP based redirect, choose between CLI or drag'n'drop interface, advanced DDOS protection, a full REST API for all features and much more.
Not sure what's up with that - Olark's been online all day (I know, it's been busy with the divshot news) and our API has had no issues (again, we've been seeing lots of activity).
The API call you list there is only available with an authorization token, so it's supposed to give a 401 unless you're logged in...