What Does Vercel Do?
vercel.com
What Does Vercel Do?
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: What Does Vercel Do?
#2Very clear explanation
Re: What Does Vercel Do?
#3Geez this sounds complicated.
What ever happened to just S/FTP your files to the web server.
Re: What Does Vercel Do?
#4Geez this sounds complicated. What ever happened to just S/FTP your files to the web server.
Still a viable option and I’d bet is how a solid % of the websites on the web are published/updated.
Re: What Does Vercel Do?
#5Geez this sounds complicated. What ever happened to just S/FTP your files to the web server.
The explanation is terrible and long winded. Here it is dumbed down:
Vercel resells servers with additional stuff ontop. When you commit code to a git repository, vercel (optionally) runs a build step (like you would on a workstation). It takes the resulting files (HTML, CSS, JS, ect), and sends them to many servers around the world. When a user requests your site, it chooses the closest one. Those servers are also capable of running small scripts when information is requested from them, to add dynamic content. Metaframeworks (some combination of a backend (like Django) and frontend (like React) framework) can generate this dynamic code.
--- End explanation, que personal thoughts) ---
I quite like this "serverless" methodology, for a variety of reasons. While it's a paradigm shift, it makes my life so much easier. For simple sites, I just write my static files, commit them, and spend... I suppose less than 30 seconds clicking buttons to set it up forever. I never need to worry about server maintenance, uptime, or security. I never need to think about updating remote files. It's also incredibly cheap for my hobby projects, as I'm not renting a server that duplicates the work of every other one on the rack.
Re: What Does Vercel Do?
#6With the exception of a Postgres offering (they went with SQLite) and what sounds like some sort of built in CMS, Cloudflare has all of this. I don't mean in a glue together your own Dropbox way but in a nicely integrated verify your GitHub profile, pick a repo, get automatic deployment and serverless functions that just work way. The same way Vercel is being described.
My understanding is that Vercel is built on top of Cloudflare and charges a significant premium.
Presumably people are paying that premium for the unspecified "nifty performance optimizations" for Nextjs and not for the CMS and Postgres. Has anyone gone from Cloudflare to Vercel that can speak to the differences they found?
Re: What Does Vercel Do?
#7Geez this sounds complicated. What ever happened to just S/FTP your files to the web server.
The explanation is terrible and long winded. Here it is dumbed down: Vercel resells servers with additional stuff ontop. When you commit code to a git repository, vercel (optionally) runs a build step (like you would on a workstation). It takes the resulting files (HTML, CSS, JS, ect), and sends them to many servers around the world. When a user requests your site, it chooses the closest one. Those servers are also c…
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Re: What Does Vercel Do?
#8Geez this sounds complicated. What ever happened to just S/FTP your files to the web server.
You can still do that. eg bunny cdn can basically act as a cdn with ftp back end
Re: What Does Vercel Do?
#9Geez this sounds complicated. What ever happened to just S/FTP your files to the web server.
The explanation is terrible and long winded. Here it is dumbed down: Vercel resells servers with additional stuff ontop. When you commit code to a git repository, vercel (optionally) runs a build step (like you would on a workstation). It takes the resulting files (HTML, CSS, JS, ect), and sends them to many servers around the world. When a user requests your site, it chooses the closest one. Those servers are also c…
Yep, this 100% is my use case (although I use Cloudflare's pages, and use supabase for storage layer). I don't even like writing js, prefer python... but it's so dang easy to use a SSG + js for dynamic content on supabase.
Re: What Does Vercel Do?
#10With the exception of a Postgres offering (they went with SQLite) and what sounds like some sort of built in CMS, Cloudflare has all of this. I don't mean in a glue together your own Dropbox way but in a nicely integrated verify your GitHub profile, pick a repo, get automatic deployment and serverless functions that just work way. The same way Vercel is being described. My understanding is that Vercel is built on top…
> My understanding is that Vercel is built on top of Cloudflare and charges a significant premium.
Are you sure it's Cloudflare and not AWS?