Today we’re excited to launch Firebase Hosting, production-grade hosting for developers. Firebase Hosting is designed for use by mission-critical sites and apps. We’ve built it from the ground up for security, reliability, and scale.
No other hosting service matches these features.
On top of this, we’ve made Hosting incredibly simple to use by providing one-command deploy and one-click rollback. Developers now have a fast, secure, and reliable way to host their apps.
Once upon a time, in the dark ages of the internet, apps dynamically generated HTML server-side every time a page was requested. This was slow, difficult to scale, and required users to connect to distant servers to get their content.
Even worse, this required clients to talk to a server on every state transition. For mobile users, this meant applications would break the moment connectivity was lost.
With the advent of fast JavaScript engines and powerful mobile devices, client-side page generation has become common. Angular, Ember, React, and a number of other client-side rendering technologies have transformed the application stack. Servers no longer need to send different HTML to each client. Instead, a single optimized set of static assets can be served to all clients. These static assets can then be placed on a geographically-distributed CDN, meaning users need only load data from a nearby point-of-presence (POP) rather than a server on the other side of the planet.
This new model has advantages for both end users and developers:
Faster Load Times: Static assets are cacheable and can be served from a local CDN POP.
Smoother State Transitions: Apps no longer need to load HTML from servers to move from page to page.
Apps Work Offline: Application logic runs on the device, meaning apps remain responsive even without network connectivity.
Easier to Scale: Delivering static content is easier than scaling server processes.
Less Complex Operations: Fewer servers to worry about means you can spend more time writing code.
Better Cross-Platform Support: Since all dynamic data is loaded from an API, it’s easier to build for mobile, web, IoT, etc.
Static apps load dynamic, personalized data from an API. Firebase is a popular choice for this API since we eliminate the need for server-side code and allow apps to deliver data changes in realtime. We’ve been thrilled to be a part of this shift and are especially excited about the popularity of our bindings for Angular, Ember, Backbone, and React.
However, providing only an API for dynamic data left our developers needing to find their own solution for hosting their assets: HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.
You, our developer community, voiced your frustration with existing hosting solutions. None of them had the same level of ease, reliability, and polish as the Firebase API. Since hosting is such an integral part of app development, we chose to solve the problem ourselves.
It means we've thought hard about how hosting should work. Firebase Hosting includes:
1. One-command deploys; one-click rollbacks
Deploy your content in seconds with the Firebase command line interface. Once uploaded, content begins serving immediately. With one click in the App Dashboard you can rollback to an earlier version and it will begin serving immediately. There’s no need to re-upload an old version if you’ve made a mistake, saving you precious time.
2. SSL by default
Every app on Firebase Hosting is served over HTTPS. Gone is the pain and expense of buying and installing an SSL certificate. From acquiring the cert to securing your domain, we do it all for you.
3. Your own domain
If you have a paid account, you can serve content from any custom domain, even a naked domain. Using our free plan? Don’t worry, you’ll get all the other advantages of Firebase Hosting on your own firebaseapp.com subdomain, for free!
4. Lightning fast content delivery
With Firebase Hosting you get a global footprint out of the box. We’re using one of the fastest CDNs available. Content is cached at POPs in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific on SSDs, meaning no matter where your users are, they get your content fast.
5. Straight-forward pricing
We’re rolling Firebase Hosting into our existing plans, without raising the price! If you’re on our free Hacker plan you get:
Firebase Hosting is available starting today. Over 1,000 apps and sites have been deployed in our beta period and we're using it to host Firebase.com!
Get started by signing up. For more details, check out the documentation.
Welcome to the future of hosting!
Chris RaynorFirebase Hosting Lead
