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Comment by tmp_anon_22 | Hacker News Reader

This starts to make sense when you consider the self-flagellation of a full server-side-rendering production setup that has existed over the past decade, to the point many SPA products completely give up on SSR - or nowadays throw themselves at the walled garden of Vercel/Next.js etc to solve it for them.

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I am not a fan of Vercel's strategy, but exactly how is the open source and MIT licensed Next.js a walled garden?

It's not. Next.js works on any platform supporting Node, and Vercel supports more than just Next.js. They support dozens of other frameworks.[0] They do promote Next.js on Vercel, but they don't stop you from using other systems.

[0]: https://vercel.com/new/templates

Ever since Vercel killed `now`'s ability to serve an index.html with `now .`, I stopped being a fan. That and the pricing blunders have unfortunately pushed me away.

On the other hand, https://docs.ycombinator.lol/ has been running for years without me ever having to worry once, so there's that. Maybe it's time to give them another try.

That never stopped working. Neither on the edge side (as your live site indicates, which has been edge cached for 109 days in San Francisco), or on the deployment site, as the example below shows:

Try it out: https://hi-there.vercel.app

  ▲  /tmp/ mkdir hi-there
  ▲  /tmp/ cd hi-there
  ▲  hi-there/ echo '<h1>hi sillysaurusx</h1>' > index.html
  ▲  hi-there/ vc
  […]
  Inspect: https://vercel.com/rauchg/hi-there [690ms]
  Production: https://hi-there.vercel.app [copied to clipboard] [9s]

In under 10s which includes the project setup and linking prompts. The main difference is that `now` got shorter to `vc`

Happy to hear more feedback on pricing. Please reach out to rauchg@vercel.com

Happy to hear that. It did, at one point -- I am quite certain of this -- but that was years ago.

I think it was in the transition between now and vercel. Back then, `now` had some sort of requirement where it only worked automatically if the folder had a package.json file. A plain index.html file required configuration. Delighted to see that this is no longer the case.

I'll give `vc` a shot.

The pricing issues stemmed from the fact that I use updown.io to monitor my domains. Since it pings them every 15 minutes or so, and since vercel spins up servers on demand, that means I was paying for essentially 24/7 service, which was an unwelcome bill over what I signed up for. Customer support gave a 50% refund, which I appreciated, and I've downgraded to a free account ever since.

Sorry Guillermo but you’re not being truthful here. “$ now” worked on any node server, not just static content, it would just run “npm start”. Now v2+ instead requires a handler-based approach.

I think I misunderstood his comment. I focused on the `index.html` example, but I think he was talking about servers (thanks for pointing that out). That said, the transition was good for servers too depending on what you were using. For example, `package.json` with Next.js was completely seamless!

Hosting next.js on Vercel and Azure is like night and day. A lot of smaller things start breaking, like `NEXT_PUBLIC_` environment variables. For me coming from Vercel, using Azure has been an uphill battle.

There's plenty of non-Vercel attempts at this and it's kind of table stakes for frameworks hoping to get popular. There is a push for server-first/MPA app development where SSR is assumed to be the baseline. Remix [1], Qwik [2], and Marko [3] are in that camp. I'm not sure about Remix but the other two have a goal of authoring the entire app components but only sending the JS needed for the parts that can change on the client.

[1] https://remix.run/ [2] https://github.com/BuilderIO/qwik [3] https://markojs.com/

The truth I learned building my own SSR JavaScript framework is that it's not that complicated, it's just made complicated.

1. Get some data from a database/source.

2. Pass that data to a template/component.

3. Convert that template/component to HTML (using the given framework's version of renderToHTML()).

4. Return the HTML to your HTTP request.

For example, here's the SSR for my framework: https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick/blob/development/node/.... It blew my mind when I wrote it because I was under the impression it would be more difficult.

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