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Vercel raise $40M Series B
11–20 of 208 posts
Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B
#12I'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.
Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B
#13Poor Gatsby. We run a Gatsby site, it was great to setup fast fast fast and has been a pain in the butt ever since. Next, from our limited experimentation, has much better ergonomics and it looks like the company has a stronger grasp on go to market. Crazy how fast that happened
Could you describe what kind of pain points have you had? I've been building a photo-intensive static personal website lately. I started off with Next.js, but later switched to Gatsby, because so many things just worked out-of-the-box with it. This was especially the case with optimizing and resizing images.
For Gatsby there is gatsby-image, which works super well. For Next.js there is next-optimized-images which is not very mature. The latest version of Next.js also provides next/image, but as far as I have understood, it requires you to run the Next.js backend server, so it is not an option for 100% static websites.
https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/image-optimization
> Instead of optimizing images at build time, Next.js optimizes images on-demand, as users request them. Unlike static site generators and static-only solutions, your build times aren't increased, whether shipping 10 images or 10 million images.
Sometimes I also bumped into issues with Next.js where the framework was trying to send some code to run on the client browser instead of running it during page generation. The division between server and client seemed a bit too hazy for my taste and felt magical in the wrong ways.
Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B
#14Vercel communications team: I watched your quasi-live streaming presentation/announcement several weeks ago, and could barely fathom what anyone was talking about. Was it your intention to completely talk over everyone's head by using arcane or invented abstractions? Trying to make investors feel they are onto something really advanced? Or just caught up in VC/SV speak? Because products that nobody understands have a…
I would also appreciate an explanation of what it is because after 10 mins on their site I still can't pin it down
Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B
#15Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?
Looks like hosting your site via your Git repo. Make a change in Git and they will push it to their servers ( probably AWS linux cluster)
Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B
#16Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?
Next is a server side rendered framework for react apps.
Next is made by Vercel.
They also have an option to staticly rendered certain pages.
They netlify but for next. Also next usually requires a node server so technically can also act as an api.
Can generate a server less bundle.
Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B
#17From first hand experience - Vercel is pretty magical. I’ve helped my wife develop an e-commerce site for her planetary-themed kids merch [1], we chose NextJS with a Shopify Storefront backend and deployed the entire thing to Vercel. Didn’t even need SSL certs, no fiddling with CDNs, it’s just magic.
We are super happy with how it turned out vs dealing with full Shopify front end/backend stores.
Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B
#18Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?
With Vercel you can easily deploy a static/SSR app in minutes, either using their NextJS framework or any other JS/TS framework.
It also provides serverless API endpoints capabilities with other languages (Python, Node, Go, Ruby). Most of this comes with a great free tier (including bandwidth which is unlimited).
Team accounts allow your team to collaborate, deploy, run analytics etc seamlessly.
It's great, they've done a great job. I might be forgetting a couple of things, but this is a big part of why they are so successful.
Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B
#19Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?
Vercel is a serverless platform like AWS Lambda or Netlify. Run your API endpoints and your client application on it but your database elsewhere. They'll make deploying your website one command but take care of an enormous amount of developer operations, including dev/staging/production environments, secrets management, server scaling, and https certificates.
Re: Vercel raise $40M Series B
#20Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?
Serverless web apps.
Using their own Next.js as an example: everything in /pages/ is client app, everything in /api/ is serverless app.
Client talks to the /api/ endpoints, /api/ endpoints talk to your domain services.
Vercel also provide edge-location hosting and caching.