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1) Covering the ~$50k hosting bill for Jmail on Vercel sounds generous, but a self-hosted VPS on Hetzner could serve the same purpose for ~€30/month, which is orders of magnitude cheaper and avoids vendor lock-in. 2) This comes as the CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, is already facing community backlash for publicly supporting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a move that’s led to boycotts and migrations off the platf…
I'm new to webdevelopment and was using Vercel because people told me it was good, but I was unaware that the company supported the genocide. What other similar services there are that you would recommend?
You could also get a VPS from Digital Ocean or Hertzner, run open-source PaaS like Coolify, Dokploy, Caprover, etc.
Digital Ocean has app platform that’s lets you host these applications but more experience than VPS
Sealos has a $7 and $25 plan and work with Next.js
Just a few options. If you’re looking to leave Next.js completely, check out Tanstack Start. It’s by the creator of React-Query (defacto way to handle fetching data in Next.js). Still some rough edges but I think it could overtake Next.js once a bit more mature.
What would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $200 a month? Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even cleanly compare usage. With render/railway/(insert provider of choice) you can at least predict that you're your biggest cost is going to be egress. edit: I just saw that it gets 450m pageviews. I'm guessing on the upper end this costs ~$1k with railway + cloudflar…
Railway is getting so good I'm not sure what Vercel brings to the party anyway.
Made the mistake. Never again.
Fly, railway, render. Avoid. All have weird show stopper bugs for any reasonable scale and you will fight against the platform compared to using big cloud.
And big cloud works better even in cases where PAAS is advertised as simpler (google cloud run and build is as easy to setup as railway but you have much more knobs to control traffic, routing, roll out etc)
450 million pageviews on Vercel = $46,000 450 million pageviews on a single 16c/32t OVH box with nginx and a 3 Gbps connection = $245
450m page views in 1 month is only 173 requests per second. You can do that on a much cheaper box.
Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway? Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.
Because you literally connect to a git repo and your site is deployed, and scales with load. Compared to managing a VM, system and application packages, config, backups and then how do you scale that?
I have what is basically a demo running on Vercel free tier, there's no way I'm maintaining a VM for that lol.
If I had a serious site, same. If I had a team, then the equation would be different.
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450m page views in 1 month is only 173 requests per second. You can do that on a much cheaper box.
You're assuming an extremely consistent traffic rate, with zero spikes....
I personally wouldn't stick it on a single VPS because we can do way better than that in terms of reliability, but the point stands that you don't need very much in terms of resources to serve this.
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It is fucking CRAZY how many cloud companies don't let you set a spending limit. I had to hunt around for a host in a suitable geography with a spending limit, almost had to go on-prem (which will happen eventually, but not in the startup phase) Waking up to bankruptcy because of bots out of your control visiting your website seems a little nuts. Adding some other bullshit on top (like cloudflare) seems even more nut…
2 reasons basically. 1. Because people vote with their wallets and not their mouths, and most companies would rather have a cost accident (quickly refunded by AWS) rather than everything going down on a saturday and not getting back up until finance can figure out their stuff. 2. Because realtime cost control is hard. It's just easier to fire off events, store them somewhere, and then aggregate at end-of-day (if that…
It's this one. If you're in a position to refund a "cost accident", then clearly you don't have to enforce cost controls in real time, and the problem becomes much easier to achieve at billing cycle granularity; the user setting a cost limit is generally doesn't care if you're a bit late to best-effort throttle them.
Unreadable without an instagram/threads account
It's also dumb because the original interaction happened on X https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 Say what you want about Elon but X is where all the investors and tech execs are. Nobody is going to sign up for threads because they saw it link to a picture in a HN post
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I don't really understand why he'd say he'd cover the costs personally... like, Vercel can just write it off, what's the significance of him paying for it?
Personal brand building? Wanting Vercel to stay out of politics? A vague attempt at diffusing the focus on Vercel pricing? Really hard to tell.
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Railway is getting so good I'm not sure what Vercel brings to the party anyway.
I would stay away from any startup for production workload. Made the mistake. Never again. Fly, railway, render. Avoid. All have weird show stopper bugs for any reasonable scale and you will fight against the platform compared to using big cloud. And big cloud works better even in cases where PAAS is advertised as simpler (google cloud run and build is as easy to setup as railway but you have much more knobs to contr…