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We Need To Talk About Vercel

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Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#141

Post by steve_taylor »

swyx wrote: post #59
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…

> while having very little moat as a company they have effectively acquihired React (Zuck's mistake). no moat? (not to mention some genuinely great cloud DX and other platform features eg with their Edge Streaming)

> they have effectively acquihired React (Zuck's mistake). no moat?

How is that a moat? They could completely own React and it still wouldn't prevent me deploying my Next.js project anywhere but Vercel.

> (not to mention some genuinely great cloud DX and other platform features eg with their Edge Streaming)

Vercel didn't invent CDNs.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#142

Post by steve_taylor »

athammer wrote: post #33
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.

They’ve helped other UI frameworks run on Vercel. They seem to be very good about that or do you mean something else?

They've "helped" frontend developers of other UI frameworks pay them $400/TB for bandwidth, not to mention various other extortionate overages and hidden charges.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#143

Post by steve_taylor »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #8

If anyone needs a CDN, please use BunnyCDN. I have tried almost every other major CDN and it just blows everything else out of the water. Regarding Vercel, they do have quite poor support so it doesn't feel rock solid and dependable. They are a great start though, but then ideally you should just switch to bare metal on Hetzner or something when you are earning serious money from your business.

Bunny.net is amazing. Its pricing is excellent for any scale. Its combination of CDN, DNS and storage services allow for unlimited static websites, each with a custom domain.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#144

Post by eezing »

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.

No vendor lock-in here. Been running NextJS on GCP Cloud Run for years and each major release has become more Docker friendly. Just my experience.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#145

Post by BFLpL0QNek »

jacooper wrote: post #131
Atlas22 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To use R2 you’d need to host images/assets separately on their own domain rather than just put a CDN infront of your entire site and forget about it. Putting assets on their own domain isn’t uncommon but for some stuff it can be a big inconvenience with build pipelines/software support.

I’m not sure on R2 specifics but I remember when I wanted vanity names on Cloudflare I.e assets.example.com it was not possible unless you give Cloudflare control over your entire domain, dropping your current nameservers or sign up for an enterprise plan for cname support.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#146

Post by jacooper »

BFLpL0QNek wrote: post #145
jacooper wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To use R2 you’d need to host images/assets separately on their own domain rather than just put a CDN infront of your entire site and forget about it. Putting assets on their own domain isn’t uncommon but for some stuff it can be a big inconvenience with build pipelines/software support. I’m not sure on R2 specifics but I remember when I wanted vanity names on Cloudflare I.e assets.example.com it was not possible unle…

I mean you are going to do that anyway to use bunny. And you are right, they need the domain to be on their nameservers.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#147

Post by jacooper »

porker wrote: post #87
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #8

If anyone needs a CDN, please use BunnyCDN. I have tried almost every other major CDN and it just blows everything else out of the water. Regarding Vercel, they do have quite poor support so it doesn't feel rock solid and dependable. They are a great start though, but then ideally you should just switch to bare metal on Hetzner or something when you are earning serious money from your business.

Better than Fastly?

Certianly cheaper.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#148

Post by HeavyFeather »

maple3142 wrote: post #99
HeavyFeather wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Potentially Unless CloudFlare cables are somehow shinier than the rest of the internet’s, adding one hop almost certainly adds latency. More hops more time. In some instances where the original server was closer than CF’s edge, I measured increased time even for cached content, effectively making CF slower for every request by that specific user.

> Unless CloudFlare cables are somehow shinier than the rest of the internet’s, adding one hop almost certainly adds latency. More hops more time. In my experience, CloudFlare (and other CDNs) can often provide a better route then a regular ISP. Sometimes downloading speed is really slow, switching to CloudFlare wrap (VPN) can at least double or triple the speed.

I assume that’s because a VPN doesn’t let the ISP do any traffic shaping, which isn’t the case for regular CDNs (unless the ISP itself “positively traffic shapes” for)

Warp also regularly lets me escape public Wi-Fi’s where in-browser uploads fail.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#149

Post by CoolCold »

steve_taylor wrote: post #136
satvikpendem wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But they insist on put your NS on cloudflare as well and afair not accepting domains greater than 2nd level.

Coming back to the load - simple 3vCPU Linux based VPS on Hetzner could handle 4Gbit of traffic serving. Offloading your server fleet probably the last reason here. Geo presence - agree here.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#150

Post by re-thc »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #119
re-thc wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare isn't 100% free unless it's only the US. Non business accounts get re-routed on major ISPs in quite a few countries. Quite an upfront cost.

Re routed?

Yes e.g. if a user is in India they may get sent to Singapore, Hong Kong or other locations to serve their traffic instead of the actual India PoP.
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