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Vercel scares the hell out of me - their previous handling of that runaway bill of 6k was atrociuos. They basically blamed the user and only handled it after it

Vercel scares the hell out of me - their previous handling of that runaway bill of 6k was atrociuos. They basically blamed the user and only handled it after it gained traction on social media. Beyond that, they do a lot of things with web, while having very little moat as a company. By that I mean they're involved in a lot of front-end libraries, articles, projects, etc. a lot of which they incorporate into their platform. Which is why everyone praises them for their ease-of-use, but anybody should know that there's a reckoning that comes after the honeymoon period when all this has to be maintained. And that stuff gets to be very expensive. Which would be fine if they were Google with a really wide moat but they're not. They're a thin layer above the big three cloud providers. It's too easy for a dev to just pack up and move to AWS where they're not paying for the overhead once the project becomes serious. It also doesn't help that they're not seen as a serious solution because of things like their poor customer service.

no_wizard 4y ago
Their moat may be from a technical perspective thin, however with that said, if you do deploy Next.js on Vercel with all the nice things that comes with out of the box, it’s hard to beat. And GCP, AWS nor Azure make it as out of the box seamless and keeps it that way as things scale. The big cloud providers “solutions” around this all fall short introducing mindless complexity to upsell you more services often with half baked integration
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  I can use their NextJS Docker container anywhere though. Currently I do it on a Hetzner VPS for a few bucks a month and handle all the scale I need, no CDN or edge runtime required.
  - steve_taylor 4y ago
    It’s worth using a CDN to reduce server load and increase your website’s speed. Cloudflare is free for most use cases and ridiculously easy to set up.
    - CoolCold 4y ago
      But they insist on put your NS on cloudflare as well and afair not accepting domains greater than 2nd level. Coming back to the load - simple 3vCPU Linux based VPS on Hetzner could handle 4Gbit of traffic serving. Offloading your server fleet probably the last reason here. Geo presence - agree here.
- steve_taylor 4y ago
  It's pretty easy to beat using GitHub Actions, a VPS host such as DigitalOcean, and a CDN such as Cloudflare or Bunny.net. You almost never need a serverless runtime when you're starting out. If you're building a SaaS, then your need to scale will be proportional to your revenue and you can easily afford to vertically and horizontally scale within your VPS provider using a small fraction of your subscription revenue. By the time you need to go serverless, you can afford to pay someone else to do it.
swyx 4y ago
> while having very little moat as a company they have effectively acquihired React (Zuck's mistake). no moat? (not to mention some genuinely great cloud DX and other platform features eg with their Edge Streaming)
- philsnow 4y ago
  > they have effectively acquihired React (Zuck's mistake). no moat? I honestly don't even know what are you saying, is it that Vercel hiring the React folks makes Vercel untouchable somehow? I see a complete disconnect between the two things. If anything, the "acquihire" could well lead to those React folks doing a job search because Vercel doesn't have a high switching-away-from cost and keeps dropping the ball PR-wise.
  - re-thc 4y ago
    There is some merit to it. Maybe not that comment but on Vercel<->React in general. Even React new docs are promoting NextJs vs something neutral.
    - andrewingram 4y ago
      The vast majority of React’s core team still works for Meta, and I think the sentiment that a small handful of “famous” hires amounts to acqui-hiring the team is frankly a little insulting to the rest of them.
      - re-thc 4y ago
        That's not the sentiment. At least not for me. As I mentioned it's not really where the employees are but the direction and perspective we as "outsiders" get from the team. E.g. - React Server Components currently only available in NextJs. - The official docs recommend NextJs and Remix. - Create React App is deprecated. Vite is not promoted. It's already not vendor neutral nor Meta focused. More people ask about NextJs than React nowadays. Perhaps these "famous" hires you mention do more promoting and it's about the perception (that works both ways). Perhaps there's the aspect of choosing the frameworks was the best technical solution but what perception did this bring to the community? People ask if you can use React with NextJs :(

no_wizard 4y ago

Their moat may be from a technical perspective thin, however with that said, if you do deploy Next.js on Vercel with all the nice things that comes with out of the box, it’s hard to beat. And GCP, AWS nor Azure make it as out of the box seamless and keeps it that way as things scale. The big cloud providers “solutions” around this all fall short introducing mindless complexity to upsell you more services often with half baked integration

satvikpendem 4y ago
I can use their NextJS Docker container anywhere though. Currently I do it on a Hetzner VPS for a few bucks a month and handle all the scale I need, no CDN or edge runtime required.
- steve_taylor 4y ago
  It’s worth using a CDN to reduce server load and increase your website’s speed. Cloudflare is free for most use cases and ridiculously easy to set up.
  - CoolCold 4y ago
    But they insist on put your NS on cloudflare as well and afair not accepting domains greater than 2nd level. Coming back to the load - simple 3vCPU Linux based VPS on Hetzner could handle 4Gbit of traffic serving. Offloading your server fleet probably the last reason here. Geo presence - agree here.
steve_taylor 4y ago
It's pretty easy to beat using GitHub Actions, a VPS host such as DigitalOcean, and a CDN such as Cloudflare or Bunny.net. You almost never need a serverless runtime when you're starting out. If you're building a SaaS, then your need to scale will be proportional to your revenue and you can easily afford to vertically and horizontally scale within your VPS provider using a small fraction of your subscription revenue. By the time you need to go serverless, you can afford to pay someone else to do it.

swyx 4y ago

> while having very little moat as a company they have effectively acquihired React (Zuck's mistake). no moat? (not to mention some genuinely great cloud DX and other platform features eg with their Edge Streaming)

philsnow 4y ago
> they have effectively acquihired React (Zuck's mistake). no moat? I honestly don't even know what are you saying, is it that Vercel hiring the React folks makes Vercel untouchable somehow? I see a complete disconnect between the two things. If anything, the "acquihire" could well lead to those React folks doing a job search because Vercel doesn't have a high switching-away-from cost and keeps dropping the ball PR-wise.
- re-thc 4y ago
  There is some merit to it. Maybe not that comment but on Vercel<->React in general. Even React new docs are promoting NextJs vs something neutral.
  - andrewingram 4y ago
    The vast majority of React’s core team still works for Meta, and I think the sentiment that a small handful of “famous” hires amounts to acqui-hiring the team is frankly a little insulting to the rest of them.
    - re-thc 4y ago
      That's not the sentiment. At least not for me. As I mentioned it's not really where the employees are but the direction and perspective we as "outsiders" get from the team. E.g. - React Server Components currently only available in NextJs. - The official docs recommend NextJs and Remix. - Create React App is deprecated. Vite is not promoted. It's already not vendor neutral nor Meta focused. More people ask about NextJs than React nowadays. Perhaps these "famous" hires you mention do more promoting and it's about the perception (that works both ways). Perhaps there's the aspect of choosing the frameworks was the best technical solution but what perception did this bring to the community? People ask if you can use React with NextJs :(