What Does Vercel Do?
vercel.com
vercel.com
"I'm a people person g-d d$%& it!!"
My understanding is that Vercel is built on top of Cloudflare and charges a significant premium.
Presumably people are paying that premium for the unspecified "nifty performance optimizations" for Nextjs and not for the CMS and Postgres. Has anyone gone from Cloudflare to Vercel that can speak to the differences they found?
Are you sure it's Cloudflare and not AWS?
However, I agree with what you said that it does "charge a significant premium". I've switched to cloudflare for a recent project and been happy with it. Right now for me, if it's work-related and company has the resources and finance, go with vercel. For personal projects & freelancer work, stick to cloudflare.
Postgres is a wrapper around neon and kv is a wrapper around upstash
Everything else is aws
What ever happened to just S/FTP your files to the web server.
Vercel resells servers with additional stuff ontop. When you commit code to a git repository, vercel (optionally) runs a build step (like you would on a workstation). It takes the resulting files (HTML, CSS, JS, ect), and sends them to many servers around the world. When a user requests your site, it chooses the closest one. Those servers are also capable of running small scripts when information is requested from them, to add dynamic content. Metaframeworks (some combination of a backend (like Django) and frontend (like React) framework) can generate this dynamic code.
--- End explanation, que personal thoughts) ---
I quite like this "serverless" methodology, for a variety of reasons. While it's a paradigm shift, it makes my life so much easier. For simple sites, I just write my static files, commit them, and spend... I suppose less than 30 seconds clicking buttons to set it up forever. I never need to worry about server maintenance, uptime, or security. I never need to think about updating remote files. It's also incredibly cheap for my hobby projects, as I'm not renting a server that duplicates the work of every other one on the rack.
I moved to Vercel and adopted a fairly serverless approach and leverage edge functions and edge caching where ever possible. It has been wonderful and I don't see myself ever going back to doing things myself. Sure, I could spin up some AWS services and figure it all out myself, but the freedom Vercel has given me has been worth the added cost. As a solo founder it has been amazing.
No more worrying about security, access control, updates, or anything other than my own product and features. I don't care how it works. I don't want to know. I just want to continue improving my product.