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We Need To Talk About Vercel

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Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#131

Post by jacooper »

Atlas22 wrote: post #53
jacooper wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly nothing compares to bandwidth free expenses with cloudflare especially with cloudflare R2. Also having different pricing for every region is very annoying.

The free version of cloudflare is essentially a "fair-use" offering, meaning that it is free until they decide its no longer free for you at their sole discretion [0]. Their terms of service prohibits distribution of any "disproportionate percentage" of non-HTML content [1]. That includes most of what you would want a CDN for: video, images, audio, binaries. They have exercised this discretion repeatedly for signific…

Then use R2, which can be used for everything with no usage limits as you are going to pay for your usage anyway.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#132

Post by jacooper »

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #47
jacooper wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly nothing compares to bandwidth free expenses with cloudflare especially with cloudflare R2. Also having different pricing for every region is very annoying.

But cloudflare can only be used safely with R2. If you use it as a CDN for your app, you have to be careful about section 2.8 of their TOS. If your usage is mostly caching a JSON API response, you are technically in violation.

Yup, that's why I said use R2 and its still cheaper than bunny, since they charge per transaction instead of bandwidth usage and its unified price for all areas.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#133

Post by jacooper »

locustous wrote: post #46
jacooper wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly nothing compares to bandwidth free expenses with cloudflare especially with cloudflare R2. Also having different pricing for every region is very annoying.

Hetzner is cheaper unless you are serving a sizable asset with R2. R2 costs per call. That cost is more than most web bundle size assets will be at Hetzner egress pricing.

Since when does hetzner have a CDN?, unless you mean storage boxes which aren't even close.

And they aren't even comparable to normal object storage, since data is protected by a single raid cluster.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#134

Post by jacooper »

getcrunk wrote: post #41
jacooper wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly nothing compares to bandwidth free expenses with cloudflare especially with cloudflare R2. Also having different pricing for every region is very annoying.

Yea but better to not keep all you eggs in one basket and also centralization of web issues re:cf

Just using them as a CDN through R2, no proxying.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#135

Post by akagusu »

We need to talk about developers.

Vercel and any other company in their space follow the same old playbook:

They play opensource to attract users and build nice stuff developers like (not necessarily what they need) to win market share and developer's mind and heart.

When they are above the competition, thanks to the free contributions of the community, they reveal their true nature and start play greed.

Developers get upset and start ranting on HN.

How many times do I need to see developers playing this movie? It's is the same shit over and over and over again.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#136

Post by steve_taylor »

satvikpendem wrote: post #93
no_wizard wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their moat may be from a technical perspective thin, however with that said, if you do deploy Next.js on Vercel with all the nice things that comes with out of the box, it’s hard to beat. And GCP, AWS nor Azure make it as out of the box seamless and keeps it that way as things scale. The big cloud providers “solutions” around this all fall short introducing mindless complexity to upsell you more services often with h…

I can use their NextJS Docker container anywhere though. Currently I do it on a Hetzner VPS for a few bucks a month and handle all the scale I need, no CDN or edge runtime required.

It’s worth using a CDN to reduce server load and increase your website’s speed. Cloudflare is free for most use cases and ridiculously easy to set up.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#137

Post by steve_taylor »

satvikpendem wrote: post #97
Kevcmk wrote: post #38

Vercel is deceitful. The Image/img fiasco really pulled the covers off for vercel for me. I have migrated all my work off of the platform. NextJS’ lint strategically dissuades you from using the img tag in favor of the NextJS Image component. If you make the mistake of heeding this advice and migrating to it, you can’t use static site generation—which means you are stuck using their hosting. Here’s one of the most PR…

You don't have to use their hosting. I use their NextJS Docker container on Hetzner and it works just fine.

I didn’t know they have a Next.js Docker image. Why do we specifically need theirs? I roll my own based on node:lts-alpine via GitHub Actions and push it to my Docker registry on GitHub.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#138

Post by steve_taylor »

leerob wrote: post #30
flimsypremise wrote: post #28

My sense of Vercel (mostly from working with NextJS) is that they are more interested in appearing to support an open source framework while making their product as difficult to interoperate with other technologies as possible in an attempt to lock users into their platform and hopefully pay for it.

Hey, I'm on the team at Vercel. What could we do better? Open to your feedback. Our platform integrates with 30+ frameworks ( https://vercel.com/docs/frameworks ), we directly fund the development of Next.js and Svelte, and we sponsor Nuxt, Astro, Solid, and more.

Don’t charge a metric fuckton for bandwidth.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#139

Post by satvikpendem »

steve_taylor wrote: post #137
satvikpendem wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to use their hosting. I use their NextJS Docker container on Hetzner and it works just fine.

I didn’t know they have a Next.js Docker image. Why do we specifically need theirs? I roll my own based on node:lts-alpine via GitHub Actions and push it to my Docker registry on GitHub.

You don't but it makes productionizing easy, I just have to pull their latest image for every build and it should work, since it's their official image.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#140

Post by steve_taylor »

no_wizard wrote: post #56
preommr wrote: post #14

Vercel scares the hell out of me - their previous handling of that runaway bill of 6k was atrociuos. They basically blamed the user and only handled it after it gained traction on social media. Beyond that, they do a lot of things with web, while having very little moat as a company. By that I mean they're involved in a lot of front-end libraries, articles, projects, etc. a lot of which they incorporate into their pl…

Their moat may be from a technical perspective thin, however with that said, if you do deploy Next.js on Vercel with all the nice things that comes with out of the box, it’s hard to beat. And GCP, AWS nor Azure make it as out of the box seamless and keeps it that way as things scale. The big cloud providers “solutions” around this all fall short introducing mindless complexity to upsell you more services often with h…

It's pretty easy to beat using GitHub Actions, a VPS host such as DigitalOcean, and a CDN such as Cloudflare or Bunny.net.

You almost never need a serverless runtime when you're starting out. If you're building a SaaS, then your need to scale will be proportional to your revenue and you can easily afford to vertically and horizontally scale within your VPS provider using a small fraction of your subscription revenue. By the time you need to go serverless, you can afford to pay someone else to do it.

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