But you don't need to use Vercel?
You either:
- Build static files and host it like any other framework (e.g. throw it in an S3 bucket)[0]
- Or, run a Node.js server
Where’s the Vercel exclusive part there?
[0] Here’s me doing exactly that, going through the same steps I would for literally any Frontend framework, including the WASM alternative I also build in the post (exact same deployment) https://codetalk.io/posts/2023-10-16-the-stack-part-3.html#n...
They are optimizing for deploying to the edge, which when self hosting you don't need to.
So whether malicious or not, their guard rails conveniently make it frustrating to self host once you need to do anything outside of their garden.
As someone in that discussion rightfully says: "We are grown-ups with access to the same tracing and profiling tools as you. There is nothing dangerous about us using Node.js as far as I’m concerned."
Additionally, your comment just reeks of PR to me. I don't know if you do it on purpose or what, but to read my comment and then come back with "Middleware works when self hosting"... it has to be intentional on your part to misunderstand my comment that badly.
My biggest gripe is that they made design decisions that are optimized for their paid products, at the expense of the open source. Middleware is the main example, because it has to run on their edge.platform, it has no routing association. For all the magic they do, they dropped the ball here, making you use regex to decide of middleware should be applied. All this because users were getting hit with surprise bills, which is.really a product of who they architected and charged, not a technical issue
It’s really annoying / impossible to implement all the fancy caching, incremental revalidation, etc if you need to run more than one instance to serve the load you get. Or you need a horrendously complex AWS buzzword graph that will kinda sorta do the things. We switched from AWS ECS deployment to Vercel after tiring of figuring out how to support Next features that require very tight cooperation from CDN/distributed cache magicks.
The total product is good, the web presence team is happy with Next and Vercel, I’m liking RSC and server actions, but I wanted to share my experience that beyond modest scale running Next yourself needs a lot of effort.
I think Next was the clear winner, we knew what we were getting into with hosting it to some degree and it was still worth because of how well it fits the team.
I guess that's how they get you, by making it onerous to self host and instead offering a clean yet more expensive solution.