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Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway? Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug

Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway? Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.

vimda 8mo ago
This is the Dropbox problem. People are willing to pay for convenience, and tech folks tend to underestimate how much convenience comes from seemingly simple solutions
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  this is convenience for tech folks and the price isn't a few bucks a month but 1000x. It's like if Dropbox was an rsync server (no app) and it cost $10,000 a month for 1TB of space. Think it would still take off?
laughingcurve 8mo ago
It’s just that simple! https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...
- unleaded 8mo ago
  it literally is though that's why i'm confused. you pay a flat monthly fee and get a box that runs linux. yes you might not be able to press one button and Effortlessly Deploy Your AI-Managed SaaS Infrastructure Product To Valued Customers Across The Metaverse or whatever vercel does but it only takes a couple hours to learn how to setup nginx node rsync and cloudflare (and even then i think there's some easier closer to one-click solutions)
  - unleaded 8mo ago
    also developing an app is something you need to be quite tech savvy to do anyway. genuinely are there really people who have the skill and patience to do that and then get stumped trying to deploy it? clearly there are since stuff like this is so popular I just don't really understand
    - tracker1 8mo ago
      I think the free/cheap tier is what gets people kind of hooked... it's really easy to setup something like Dokku self-hosted and run a few dozen apps on a decent rented server... Even then, there's something appealing about not having to even worry about it. Why bother setting up your own server(s) and databases when you can run in Cloudflare workers with CockroachLabs or Turso? Even with my own server, I've explored the option(s) just to avoid potential pain down the road regarding excess load.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
aeternum 8mo ago
Most people don't know what VPS and Node are.
burnte 8mo ago
They spend $$$ on marketing to execs. A couple of months ago my CEO came to me with a $30k Vercel app I could have done for $1500 on our own hardware.
scubadude 8mo ago
>Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway? Because you literally connect to a git repo and your site is deployed, and scales with load. Compared to managing a VM, system and application packages, config, backups and then how do you scale that? I have what is basically a demo running on Vercel free tier, there's no way I'm maintaining a VM for that lol. If I had a serious site, same. If I had a team, then the equation would be different.
- coolThingsFirst 8mo ago
  I really do think that paying for convenience is a good business model. No one is forcing anyone to use it.

vimda 8mo ago

This is the Dropbox problem. People are willing to pay for convenience, and tech folks tend to underestimate how much convenience comes from seemingly simple solutions

direwolf20 8mo ago
this is convenience for tech folks and the price isn't a few bucks a month but 1000x. It's like if Dropbox was an rsync server (no app) and it cost $10,000 a month for 1TB of space. Think it would still take off?

laughingcurve 8mo ago

It’s just that simple! https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...

unleaded 8mo ago
it literally is though that's why i'm confused. you pay a flat monthly fee and get a box that runs linux. yes you might not be able to press one button and Effortlessly Deploy Your AI-Managed SaaS Infrastructure Product To Valued Customers Across The Metaverse or whatever vercel does but it only takes a couple hours to learn how to setup nginx node rsync and cloudflare (and even then i think there's some easier closer to one-click solutions)
- unleaded 8mo ago
  also developing an app is something you need to be quite tech savvy to do anyway. genuinely are there really people who have the skill and patience to do that and then get stumped trying to deploy it? clearly there are since stuff like this is so popular I just don't really understand
  - tracker1 8mo ago
    I think the free/cheap tier is what gets people kind of hooked... it's really easy to setup something like Dokku self-hosted and run a few dozen apps on a decent rented server... Even then, there's something appealing about not having to even worry about it. Why bother setting up your own server(s) and databases when you can run in Cloudflare workers with CockroachLabs or Turso? Even with my own server, I've explored the option(s) just to avoid potential pain down the road regarding excess load.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

aeternum 8mo ago

Most people don't know what VPS and Node are.

burnte 8mo ago

They spend $$$ on marketing to execs. A couple of months ago my CEO came to me with a $30k Vercel app I could have done for $1500 on our own hardware.

scubadude 8mo ago

>Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway? Because you literally connect to a git repo and your site is deployed, and scales with load. Compared to managing a VM, system and application packages, config, backups and then how do you scale that? I have what is basically a demo running on Vercel free tier, there's no way I'm maintaining a VM for that lol. If I had a serious site, same. If I had a team, then the equation would be different.

coolThingsFirst 8mo ago
I really do think that paying for convenience is a good business model. No one is forcing anyone to use it.