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I really don’t understand how people can trust platforms like Vercel, Fly.io over robust could providers like Cloudflare, AWS or Azure. I mean, Vercel has its

I really don’t understand how people can trust platforms like Vercel, Fly.io over robust could providers like Cloudflare, AWS or Azure. I mean, Vercel has its usefulness, it’s so well integrated with the NextJS stack, it totally makes sense for small amateurish projects since it saves you time and money… but once you want to push to production, have real customers and satisfy them reliably, these platforms can’t compete with the big ones.

leerob 3y ago
Edit: Nevermind, wrong thread. Vercel does honor DCMA, of course, though.
- jiayo 3y ago
  You work at Vercel. Are you saying Vercel does not honour DMCA takedown requests and that is a selling point of using Vercel? This seems like a strange thing to brag about.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    > This seems like a strange thing to brag about. Not to me, it isn't. There are plenty of areas-of-interest that attract both hobbyists and serious academics alike - which also tends to attract unwanted attention from callous legal departments who are keep to adopt a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy - things like (lawful) research into DRM techniques, retro video-games (and not ROM hosting), infosec disclosures, and so on - so if you're really into those areas and want a safe place for your lawful content but without worrying about your site/content/services being taken-down without good cause then it makes sense to side with a provider who is able to resist DMCA requests.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
elliotec 3y ago
Vercel is great for pre-prod ethereal environments for testing and CI. But they desperately want to sell you their enterprise stack which is completely inadequate, and will drag their feet for months if you just want to sign the damn “pro” version.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  Also, simple stuff like bandwidth is wildly overpriced with Vercel. My company switched away from all their magic image resizing stuff because as our traffic increased the bandwidth was 10x that of doing all media content through Prismic.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    Vercel is hosted on AWS, and they're definitely not in the business of subsidizing AWS per-GB costs. Although the >2x markup is egregious ($40/100gb aka $0.40/gb over 1tb, versus AWS' $0.15/gb in its most expensive region, Sao Paulo, Brazil).
junon 3y ago
I worked at ZEIT (before it became Vercel) and if they've retained even a 10th of their engineering culture then they're solid, if not a bit "niche" in what and who they target. Anecdotal, sure, but it'd be hard to quantify it.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  It’s funny how frontend has a stigma of less serious engineering when the caliber of programming being done at Vercel is far beyond the level of inadequacy I’ve seen being in big tech FAANG eng departments.
  - arcanemachiner 3y ago
    I think this comment is intended as a compliment to Vercel, but it's hard to tell from the wording.
    - reducesuffering 3y ago
      Apologies. Yes, big tech == overrated, Vercel tech == underrated
      - OJFord 3y ago
        It's 'beyond the level of inadequacy' which is amusingly ambiguous!
        globalise83 3y ago
        They reliably exceed 99.99% inadequacy overachievement - there, made it less ambiguous for you.
        stavros 3y ago
        Yes, but exceed which way?
  - 3y ago
dboreham 3y ago
> I really don’t understand how people can trust platforms like Vercel It's not an apples to apples choice. The people who use Vercel don't know anything about how to deploy on AWS. That's the whole point of Vercel. Whether or not they can be trusted is really orthogonal to the reason they were selected as a provider. But that said, they're just a layer over AWS so why should they be significantly less trustworthy? I haven't used Vercel in production, but I have used a similar "layer over AWS" service (Aptible). The problem where wasn't to do with QoS or support, but rather that the narrowing of the functionality of the "interface" (which is pretty much the point) ends up causing frustration when you want to integrate with other stuff you're doing in AWS.
- Swizec 3y ago
  > The people who use Vercel don't know anything about how to deploy on AWS Ehhhh. I’ve been deploying to AWS professionally for years and I’d choose Vercel for a personal project any day of the week. Life’s too short to play devops/sysadmin/sre without someone paying you the big bucks.
  - bingemaker 3y ago
    This. Anyone who has done enough ops knows that a platform (Vercel, Heroku, Netlify etc) which lets devs connect a git repo with a couple of clicks, and deploys automatically happen is a good devops experience. This is great for personal projects. This is great for budding projects in a professional setup as well.
    - Swizec 3y ago
      If I never again have to write a httpd.conf or nginx.conf file from scratch it will be too soon.
      - OJFord 3y ago
        Either you mean 'too late' or that's a complicated way of making a dissenting point?
mattnewton 3y ago
Plenty of people end up building vercel-but-worse out of CI pipelines on aws or similar, doesn’t strike me as crazy to keep using it well past the prototype stage for projects that for its constraints.
infecto 3y ago
Whats the use case for edge computing like Fly.io. I have yet to figure it out the use case where a edge provider is necessary. That is, having a database on the edge.
- maxbond 3y ago
  You could have your realtime competitive FPS game like Call of Duty host the data and compute necessary to run a match as close to the median location of all the players involved as possible to reduce latency. You could make the same case for something like Zoom or a collaborative editing tool.
- simonw 3y ago
  Having customers in places around the world. If you site is hosted in North Virginia, and you have customers in Australia, they are going to really suffer from the speed of light.
  - ushakov 3y ago
    That’s very rare though. Unless you’re Shopify, location doesn’t really matter
    - x0x0 3y ago
      Common enough to have a couple customers in the EU or apac who consistently complain that your site is glacial and it turns out to be pretty bad for them...
  - infecto 3y ago
    Definitely. I guess where my ignorance comes in, from an engineering perspective is the way fly.io thinks about edge databases more difficult to architect than a more traditional route creating a subdomain for a region and just replicating your entire infrastructure in a new <insert cloud provider> region? I guess you can setup the same kind of structure inside of fly.io but I remember some of their writeups have been talking about deployment and pushing the DB to the edge and then having eventual consistency across? I think that is my hangup on use cases.
oefrha 3y ago
This is what happens when you do HN-frontpage-driven development. I mean, they use Bun (which I’m sure will be great in a couple years’ time) and quickly ran into an fd leak in it. Does that sound like a production grade runtime? However, I suppose it’s good for content marketing. You’re not going to make front page by choosing boring old technology (unless you’re migrating back to boring old technology after failed HN-frontpage-driven development).
- ushakov 3y ago
  Their stack speaks for itself: Next.js, TailwindCSS, shadcn/ui, tinybird, turso, drizzle, clerk, Resend That’s for an app which sends a ping to a URL every x minutes…
  - hipadev23 3y ago
    > That’s for an app which sends a ping to a URL every x minutes… My bigger question is: How the fuck do these companies keep getting created? There's gotta be more uptime-monitor SaaS companies than todo MVC demos in existence.
    - tmikaeld 3y ago
      It’s easy to get the free users, where of just a smaller % need to upgrade to keep you afloat. Then there’s the possibility to upsell other related services like analytics or logs. Betterstack did this very well.
      - ushakov 3y ago
        > a smaller % need to upgrade to keep you afloat Until yet another free competitor comes along. Then you're out of business
    - ushakov 3y ago
      Because these people are bad businessmen. There is not a single reason yet another uptime monitoring business needs to exist. They have no chance at succeeding the likes of Datadog, New Relic. Conclusion: promising builders being bad at startups
teddyh 3y ago
Some people avoid large providers, since large providers have approximately no incentive whatsoever to keep you, specifically, as a customer. I.e. large providers will happily raise their prices, alter the deal, throw you under the bus, disable your account, delete all you data and then refuse to talk to you. They can do this because, when they look at the big picture, you don’t matter to them. And since doing this saves them some money, they all do it.
- MuteXR 3y ago
  And a small service can go under anytime, without any real warning. Most big providers end up being cheaper for you as well. Vercel is insanely expensive.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    > And a small service can go under anytime, without any real warning. Both large and small providers could make the ground from under your feet disappear, in different ways. But only the small provider has a real incentive to actually keep you, as just one customer. It’s only when a small provider goes out of business completely that you have any risk. And that’s unlikely to happen, unless they’re delusional or funded by squirrel-minded VCs – which are things you can determine beforehand.
- kunley 3y ago
  Right. Plus, large providers usually don't offer support for small-sized instances/containers/whatever, so even if you optimized your deployment to use less resources, you need to buy a bigger thing. But to the main point: using an extra layer which is on the top of said large provider, like here Vercel over AWS, is not a solution, as this middle man also can be marginalized by the big bully at some moment. This is why I prefer small providers, like Vultr. (Not affiliated with them in any way; just a happy customer).
intelVISA 3y ago
The only platform you can truly trust is the one you handcraft down to the NAND gates.
- preciousoo 3y ago
  If you’re not mining your lithium and cobalt with your own handmade pickaxe you’re doing it wrong
  - paradox460 3y ago
    If you don't have your own star spitting out bespoke elements, are you really doing it at all, or just using someone else's work
pjmlp 3y ago
Several SaaS companies are pushing for Next.js as their main SDK, that is how real customers end up in Vercel.

leerob 3y ago

Edit: Nevermind, wrong thread. Vercel does honor DCMA, of course, though.

jiayo 3y ago
You work at Vercel. Are you saying Vercel does not honour DMCA takedown requests and that is a selling point of using Vercel? This seems like a strange thing to brag about.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > This seems like a strange thing to brag about. Not to me, it isn't. There are plenty of areas-of-interest that attract both hobbyists and serious academics alike - which also tends to attract unwanted attention from callous legal departments who are keep to adopt a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy - things like (lawful) research into DRM techniques, retro video-games (and not ROM hosting), infosec disclosures, and so on - so if you're really into those areas and want a safe place for your lawful content but without worrying about your site/content/services being taken-down without good cause then it makes sense to side with a provider who is able to resist DMCA requests.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

elliotec 3y ago

Vercel is great for pre-prod ethereal environments for testing and CI. But they desperately want to sell you their enterprise stack which is completely inadequate, and will drag their feet for months if you just want to sign the damn “pro” version.

crooked-v 3y ago
Also, simple stuff like bandwidth is wildly overpriced with Vercel. My company switched away from all their magic image resizing stuff because as our traffic increased the bandwidth was 10x that of doing all media content through Prismic.
- judge2020 3y ago
  Vercel is hosted on AWS, and they're definitely not in the business of subsidizing AWS per-GB costs. Although the >2x markup is egregious ($40/100gb aka $0.40/gb over 1tb, versus AWS' $0.15/gb in its most expensive region, Sao Paulo, Brazil).

junon 3y ago

I worked at ZEIT (before it became Vercel) and if they've retained even a 10th of their engineering culture then they're solid, if not a bit "niche" in what and who they target. Anecdotal, sure, but it'd be hard to quantify it.

reducesuffering 3y ago
It’s funny how frontend has a stigma of less serious engineering when the caliber of programming being done at Vercel is far beyond the level of inadequacy I’ve seen being in big tech FAANG eng departments.
- arcanemachiner 3y ago
  I think this comment is intended as a compliment to Vercel, but it's hard to tell from the wording.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    Apologies. Yes, big tech == overrated, Vercel tech == underrated
    - OJFord 3y ago
      It's 'beyond the level of inadequacy' which is amusingly ambiguous!
      - globalise83 3y ago
        They reliably exceed 99.99% inadequacy overachievement - there, made it less ambiguous for you.
        stavros 3y ago
        Yes, but exceed which way?
- 3y ago

dboreham 3y ago

> I really don’t understand how people can trust platforms like Vercel It's not an apples to apples choice. The people who use Vercel don't know anything about how to deploy on AWS. That's the whole point of Vercel. Whether or not they can be trusted is really orthogonal to the reason they were selected as a provider. But that said, they're just a layer over AWS so why should they be significantly less trustworthy? I haven't used Vercel in production, but I have used a similar "layer over AWS" service (Aptible). The problem where wasn't to do with QoS or support, but rather that the narrowing of the functionality of the "interface" (which is pretty much the point) ends up causing frustration when you want to integrate with other stuff you're doing in AWS.

Swizec 3y ago
> The people who use Vercel don't know anything about how to deploy on AWS Ehhhh. I’ve been deploying to AWS professionally for years and I’d choose Vercel for a personal project any day of the week. Life’s too short to play devops/sysadmin/sre without someone paying you the big bucks.
- bingemaker 3y ago
  This. Anyone who has done enough ops knows that a platform (Vercel, Heroku, Netlify etc) which lets devs connect a git repo with a couple of clicks, and deploys automatically happen is a good devops experience. This is great for personal projects. This is great for budding projects in a professional setup as well.
  - Swizec 3y ago
    If I never again have to write a httpd.conf or nginx.conf file from scratch it will be too soon.
    - OJFord 3y ago
      Either you mean 'too late' or that's a complicated way of making a dissenting point?

mattnewton 3y ago

Plenty of people end up building vercel-but-worse out of CI pipelines on aws or similar, doesn’t strike me as crazy to keep using it well past the prototype stage for projects that for its constraints.

infecto 3y ago

Whats the use case for edge computing like Fly.io. I have yet to figure it out the use case where a edge provider is necessary. That is, having a database on the edge.

maxbond 3y ago
You could have your realtime competitive FPS game like Call of Duty host the data and compute necessary to run a match as close to the median location of all the players involved as possible to reduce latency. You could make the same case for something like Zoom or a collaborative editing tool.
simonw 3y ago
Having customers in places around the world. If you site is hosted in North Virginia, and you have customers in Australia, they are going to really suffer from the speed of light.
- ushakov 3y ago
  That’s very rare though. Unless you’re Shopify, location doesn’t really matter
  - x0x0 3y ago
    Common enough to have a couple customers in the EU or apac who consistently complain that your site is glacial and it turns out to be pretty bad for them...
- infecto 3y ago
  Definitely. I guess where my ignorance comes in, from an engineering perspective is the way fly.io thinks about edge databases more difficult to architect than a more traditional route creating a subdomain for a region and just replicating your entire infrastructure in a new <insert cloud provider> region? I guess you can setup the same kind of structure inside of fly.io but I remember some of their writeups have been talking about deployment and pushing the DB to the edge and then having eventual consistency across? I think that is my hangup on use cases.

oefrha 3y ago

This is what happens when you do HN-frontpage-driven development. I mean, they use Bun (which I’m sure will be great in a couple years’ time) and quickly ran into an fd leak in it. Does that sound like a production grade runtime? However, I suppose it’s good for content marketing. You’re not going to make front page by choosing boring old technology (unless you’re migrating back to boring old technology after failed HN-frontpage-driven development).

ushakov 3y ago
Their stack speaks for itself: Next.js, TailwindCSS, shadcn/ui, tinybird, turso, drizzle, clerk, Resend That’s for an app which sends a ping to a URL every x minutes…
- hipadev23 3y ago
  > That’s for an app which sends a ping to a URL every x minutes… My bigger question is: How the fuck do these companies keep getting created? There's gotta be more uptime-monitor SaaS companies than todo MVC demos in existence.
  - tmikaeld 3y ago
    It’s easy to get the free users, where of just a smaller % need to upgrade to keep you afloat. Then there’s the possibility to upsell other related services like analytics or logs. Betterstack did this very well.
    - ushakov 3y ago
      > a smaller % need to upgrade to keep you afloat Until yet another free competitor comes along. Then you're out of business
  - ushakov 3y ago
    Because these people are bad businessmen. There is not a single reason yet another uptime monitoring business needs to exist. They have no chance at succeeding the likes of Datadog, New Relic. Conclusion: promising builders being bad at startups

teddyh 3y ago

Some people avoid large providers, since large providers have approximately no incentive whatsoever to keep you, specifically, as a customer. I.e. large providers will happily raise their prices, alter the deal, throw you under the bus, disable your account, delete all you data and then refuse to talk to you. They can do this because, when they look at the big picture, you don’t matter to them. And since doing this saves them some money, they all do it.

MuteXR 3y ago
And a small service can go under anytime, without any real warning. Most big providers end up being cheaper for you as well. Vercel is insanely expensive.
- teddyh 3y ago
  > And a small service can go under anytime, without any real warning. Both large and small providers could make the ground from under your feet disappear, in different ways. But only the small provider has a real incentive to actually keep you, as just one customer. It’s only when a small provider goes out of business completely that you have any risk. And that’s unlikely to happen, unless they’re delusional or funded by squirrel-minded VCs – which are things you can determine beforehand.
kunley 3y ago
Right. Plus, large providers usually don't offer support for small-sized instances/containers/whatever, so even if you optimized your deployment to use less resources, you need to buy a bigger thing. But to the main point: using an extra layer which is on the top of said large provider, like here Vercel over AWS, is not a solution, as this middle man also can be marginalized by the big bully at some moment. This is why I prefer small providers, like Vultr. (Not affiliated with them in any way; just a happy customer).

intelVISA 3y ago

The only platform you can truly trust is the one you handcraft down to the NAND gates.

preciousoo 3y ago
If you’re not mining your lithium and cobalt with your own handmade pickaxe you’re doing it wrong
- paradox460 3y ago
  If you don't have your own star spitting out bespoke elements, are you really doing it at all, or just using someone else's work

pjmlp 3y ago

Several SaaS companies are pushing for Next.js as their main SDK, that is how real customers end up in Vercel.