Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

vercel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 203 posts

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#131

Post by grawprog »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #67
adriand wrote: post #45

As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it. Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to p…

What value is there in renaming anything? You've said that out that "Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name." but you imply it doesn't matter - so what's the point? Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of ideas (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3 times because... why? I doubt they have a viable product yet. A name change isn't going to help).

>Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of ideas (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3 times because... why?

This is what I figure. That or they want people to forget about lousy things they've done. Dunno if it was ever true, but hearing the rumour that Kentucky fried chicken switched to KFC to avoid being associated with fried chicken and the health issues surrounding trans fats that were a big deal at the time sort of stuck with me.

Personally, I'd trust the company that's kept the same boring name for a decade over one that's renamed themselves several times in the same period.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#132

Post by simplify »

sandGorgon wrote: post #12

Nextjs is most likely going to be the new Ruby on Rails. javascript all the way down, static rendering, PWA, server side rendering...everything baked in. This is a big backing for Next. However rebranding to Vercel is bad.

Ruby on Rails is still the new Ruby on Rails. JS solutions still need another five years to catch up, unfortunately.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#133

Post by deltron3030 »

mxstbr wrote: post #29
franky47 wrote: post #6

Congrats on the funding, but I'd like to know what prompted the name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel sounds like a company selling expensive handbags (to me).

The name change makes a lot of sense to me, tactically (no matter what you think of the new name). ZEIT is associated with full-stack hosting including backend servers, which they no longer want to focus on to. To solidify their pivot to frontend hosting in their users mind, they rename to strip all previous connotations from their brand.

Names are like colors and shapes, and their new one doesn't really indicate that they're innovators. Zeit was cool because german names in tech are quite rare, it was showing that they did things differently. Vercel sounds like a lame web 1.0 thing, it's more rigid, rolls way harder off the tongue.

Focusing on backend servers or not is just a implementation detail as a hosting company that want's you to not care about the underlying tech, the name itself is way more important at their size.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#134

Post by chrismorgan »

adriand wrote: post #45

As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it. Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to p…

Related: ConvertKit rebranded to seva and then fairly promptly rolled the decision back based on customer feedback. https://convertkit.com/staying-convertkit gives details. I was pleased at the reversion, though for completely different reasons: I think the rebrand was foolish purely because it went from a memorable name with meaning (even if that meaning didn’t exactly match the purpose for all of their customers) to a four-letter word that’s meaningless to most people and says nothing at all about the company or product.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#135

Post by iamtherhino »

matthewcford wrote: post #34

one of our clients uses netlify, does anyone have experience with the two platforms and how they compare on price at the enterprise levels?

Vercel/ZEIT is typically a bit cheaper in the long run for popular sites with the fixed costs. If your traffic is really light, then Netlify probably is.

If deploying a Next.js site, it makes sense to deploy on top of the platform made for it (ZEIT/Vercel)

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#136

Post by covidcovidcovid »

SloopJon wrote: post #130
covidcovidcovid wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you use decimal type that is not available in JavaScript.

I'm curious what you're comparing JavaScript to. Decimal is the native numeric datatype for the stored procedure language of the database I use. Otherwise, even in languages that have a decimal class in their standard library, it's usually pretty clunky to use; no better than, say, https://github.com/MikeMcl/decimal.js/ C# is perhaps the best among mainstream languages, although its implementation is a bit weird.

What is clunky about decimal type? You declare a decimal variable and then use it exactly like any other numeric type. Here is an example: https://dotnetfiddle.net/jjJHA6

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#137

Post by RonanTheGrey »

sholladay wrote: post #50

I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2] Fool me once... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...

I was an early adopter of Now v1 and loved it. I evangelized it to all my clients, used it on every project - it was such a breath of fresh air that deploying a server was now so easy.

Ok, I get that serverless is a different paradigm. And I understand the arguments for it. But I refused to use Now v2 precisely because they violated their promises they had made -- but worse, turned it into "just another AWS". If I want serverless, I'll use AWS because frankly Zeit/Vercel's visibility into what is going on is just abysmal. And FWIW we now have several projects running on serverless -- using Next.js -- on AWS. Using the severless component, it requires NO special considerations and could easily be redeployed on a standard server in minutes. No vendor lock in, funny how that worked out? I expected to be locked in on AWS serverless. That didn't happen.

The icing on the cake was when they didn't officially deprecate v1, but made it so unstable, so unusable, that I got to the point of spending DAYS per week deploying and redeploying and redeploying our docker containers because their servers would randomly decide that the hosting server no longer had a network connection. If I see E_AGAIN one more time I'm going to spit.

And then they upped the price from $20/mo that we were paying for 4 containers, to $150. Thanks guys.

It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I spent a day, redid everything to deploy on AWS EB, and haven't looked back since. That was the LEAST amount of time I'd spent on that, in a given week, for about a 4 month period prior. To be fair, the guy running Zeit/Vercel's support is pretty solid. He did try to be helpful.

My experience with the technical leadership has been left lacking. We tried several times to contribute to Next.js and were treated like idiot children because how dare we trample on their kingdom. If you're not a tech bro, stay in your lane!

Look I'm just sharing my experience over there. It has been roundly negative. I'm sure others can come with anecdotes of it being roundly positive, good for you. Mine is just another anecdote but it's the only insight I have.

Although, the 1500+ comment thread on Spectrum when they announced v2 strongly suggests I'm not alone.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#138

Post by [deleted] »

mtm7 wrote: post #121

I'm a huge fan of Zeit/Vercel's products and design. I've interacted with their team on a few occasions and they've always been nice. Plus, their mechanical keyboard is super cool... [0] I absolutely loved the name "Zeit", although I've read in this thread that it could have branding/SEO issues. I'm hoping Vercel will grow on me – right now, it sounds like a combination of "incel", "Verizon", and maybe some kind of g…

[deleted]

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#139

Post by dominotw »

pbreit wrote: post #111
zoul wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me as a noob with very simple requirements, it’s very refreshing not having to care where and how my server code runs. Just add to a repo, push and forget. And if my code is written against some simple HTTP request interface, there shouldn’t be much trouble to move it elsewhere.

So, where do you host? What data store do you use?

I host data on firebase db use firebase cloud functions for "serverless" compute. I just do android development and never mess with AWS/k8s/whatever.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#140

Post by jonas21 »

netsharc wrote: post #46
brazzy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a German word and the name of one of Germany's biggest newspapers, and probably part of the name of dozens of businesses in all kinds of industries in Germany. Using a made-up brand name is the standard way to avoid potential trademark conflicts, and at the same time be more easily findable via Google.

Yeah, not having your name instantly googleable in Germany (a big economy with a lot of developers) is probably a hindrance. Not to mention how stupid it would be to use in a sentence, imagine calling your product "Time", and a developer says e.g. "we're having issues with time.."

A lot of products sound stupid when used in a sentence before you get used to them.

We're having issues with zoom...

We're having issues with chrome...

We're having issues with word...

Post reply on HN