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I'm a huge fan of vercel, it's saved me a lot of money[1] this year. Their developer experience is incredibly friendly and they've contributed extremely useful

I'm a huge fan of vercel, it's saved me a lot of money[1] this year. Their developer experience is incredibly friendly and they've contributed extremely useful libraries to open-source, including micro and next.js. I've had great support experiences for some serious issues like platform bugs. They're in a tough position because the serverless paradigm is still foreign to many people, and many typical project dependencies won't operate in a serverless environment. I have a set of critiques just like any infrastructure user, but by and large Vercel is moving in the right direction and I'm looking forward to seeing them succeed! [1] My bill running CollegeAI.com on Kubernetes went from $600/mo to $20/mo with Vercel. It required a large refactor to serverless and the initial week of deployment the performance was so much better I got a massive traffic spike that increased my traffic from tens to thousands of daily signups. The bill that month was over $1000 because I didn't have the serverless parameters set up totally correctly.

texasbigdata 6y ago
Could you talk more about your experience mentioned in [1]? That’s super material in terms of improvement.
- tomlin 6y ago
  He's an employee of Versel. I'm sure he'll have all kinds of "experiences"
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    Is he?
    - texasbigdata 6y ago
      Based on his HN linked Twitter and his LinkedIn from googling his name, that does not appear to be the case at all. Not sure why someone would lob an accusation like that.
      - leerob 6y ago
        He's not an employee, but a customer of Vercel.
      - tomlin 6y ago
        Because it's verifiably true, all you have to do is know it in your heart.
        seveibar 6y ago
        You are 100% incorrect. I have only been a customer and never an employee or paid in any way by vercel.
    - tomlin 6y ago
      No. This is called sarcasm.
- seveibar 6y ago
  It's from a bygone era when Vercel would charge for serverless invocations. I think it still might be possible to run into the problem in overage so I can describe it a bit. Basically I was polling an API endpoint on our SPA client. Maybe one hit every second. We were getting over 10,000 (non-signup) users a day, so it ended up being a lot of requests. Our functions were configured with the default amount of RAM and CPU allocation. When I saw the bill shoot up, I reduced the rate of polling and adjusted the serverless functions to have a lower amount of RAM. This got the price down to $50/mo. Later, Vercel would make pricing per developer seat so the price dropped even more. The traffic dropped to more reasonable levels after that. But it was a very good week and the traffic remained nominally 2x-5x. I'm sure google's algorithm played some part in the traffic spike. (also, I am not an employee of Vercel, just a customer :)
vijaybritto 6y ago
Can you please explain a bit more? This sounds very interesting and it might teach things that we don't know about vercel.
- seveibar 6y ago
  I explained it a bit above :) generally Vercel works really well for high-traffic sites without worrying about auto-scaling. But you'll run into unique issues whenever you're dealing with two many digits haha I think my problems were always more pronounced with Kubernetes fwiw :)

texasbigdata 6y ago

Could you talk more about your experience mentioned in [1]? That’s super material in terms of improvement.

tomlin 6y ago
He's an employee of Versel. I'm sure he'll have all kinds of "experiences"
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  Is he?
  - texasbigdata 6y ago
    Based on his HN linked Twitter and his LinkedIn from googling his name, that does not appear to be the case at all. Not sure why someone would lob an accusation like that.
    - leerob 6y ago
      He's not an employee, but a customer of Vercel.
    - tomlin 6y ago
      Because it's verifiably true, all you have to do is know it in your heart.
      - seveibar 6y ago
        You are 100% incorrect. I have only been a customer and never an employee or paid in any way by vercel.
  - tomlin 6y ago
    No. This is called sarcasm.
seveibar 6y ago
It's from a bygone era when Vercel would charge for serverless invocations. I think it still might be possible to run into the problem in overage so I can describe it a bit. Basically I was polling an API endpoint on our SPA client. Maybe one hit every second. We were getting over 10,000 (non-signup) users a day, so it ended up being a lot of requests. Our functions were configured with the default amount of RAM and CPU allocation. When I saw the bill shoot up, I reduced the rate of polling and adjusted the serverless functions to have a lower amount of RAM. This got the price down to $50/mo. Later, Vercel would make pricing per developer seat so the price dropped even more. The traffic dropped to more reasonable levels after that. But it was a very good week and the traffic remained nominally 2x-5x. I'm sure google's algorithm played some part in the traffic spike. (also, I am not an employee of Vercel, just a customer :)

vijaybritto 6y ago

Can you please explain a bit more? This sounds very interesting and it might teach things that we don't know about vercel.

seveibar 6y ago
I explained it a bit above :) generally Vercel works really well for high-traffic sites without worrying about auto-scaling. But you'll run into unique issues whenever you're dealing with two many digits haha I think my problems were always more pronounced with Kubernetes fwiw :)