What is the rationale for using vercel ? I'm getting a lot of value out of cloudflare with the $5/month plan lately but my bare metal box with triple digit ram has seen zero downtime since 2015.

They put a massive amount of VC cash into convincing people that Next.js was "the modern way" to create a website. Then they got lucky with the timing of LLMs becoming popular while they were the hot thing, leading LLMs to default to it when creating new websites. To picture that amount of VC cash - they're at Series F, and a huge chunk of that went towards marketing.

Both have been changing as people realize it's rarely the right tool for the job, and as LLMs also become more intelligent and better at suggesting other, better options depending on what is asked for (especially Claude Opus).

I haven't used Cloudflare and am the first to shit on Vercel. But I have to say, some aspects of their hosting are nice. In many ways it really is just a terminal command and up it goes with good tooling around it. For example, the PR previews take zero setup and just work. Managing your projects is easy, it's all nicely designed, it integrates well with Next and some other frontend-heavy systems and so on.

You use a free template that's done in Next.js and uses its Image component, so you need a server.

Everything runs fine locally until you try to deploy it, and bam you need 4g ram machine to run the thing.

So you host it on Vercel for free cause it's easy!

Then you want to check for more than 30 seconds of analytics, and it's pay time.

Out of curiosity what are you using cloudflare for that it costs $5 and who do you use for the baremetal box?

Very nice developer experience. A lot of batteries included, like CDN, incremental page regeneration, image pipeline or observability. Not having to maintain a server.

I’m still planning to move elsewhere though, the vendor lock-in is not worth it and I’d like to keep our infra in the EU.

For many people Vercel is Easy (not simple)

Knowing how to operate a basic server is perceived as hard and dangerous by many, especially the generation that didn’t have a chance to play with Linux for fun when growing up

If you are using nextjs it is easier because vercel done a lot of things to make it a pain to host outside of vercel.

For a lot of folks, I think its ease of deployment when using Next.js. I switched to astro, also doing a lot of cloudflare at the moment. Before that, I was doing OpenNext with sst.dev on AWS but it started feeling annoying.

it's free for newbies and everyone, ofc it's a trap but freemium model gets people. aws can cost easily few thousands with 2-3 mistakes and clicks. vercel makes you start free then if you grow they bill you 10x-100x aws

I suppose their market is one click deployments. Maybe for non technical people or people not willing to deal with infra.

Can one host a Next js app on cloudflare?

Develop experience. Ephemeral deploys. Decent observability. Decent CI options. Generous free tier.

I started using it a few years ago when I moved to my current company, and have to say I've learned to like it quite a bit. Moving to Cloudflare is an option, but currently it just works so we can't be bothered. Costs are not nothing, but basically no issues with it until now, and it's not so expensive that it raises eyebrows with the biggest being that we have 3 seats. The setup is quick and again it just works. We are a very small team, and the fact we don't have to deal with it on a daily/weekly basis is valuable. Obviously this current situation is a problem, but I am not sure which platform is free of issues like these. People act like it can't happen to me, until it does.

It takes a while to realize you're being gaslit.

0.82% of homes are burglarized every year.

Meaning since 2015, you’ve got an 8.2% chance of having someone walk out with that box. Hopefully there’s nothing precious on it.