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Genuine question: How is that a value proposition when Cloudflare offers a CDN for free with unlimited bandwidth, that you could just put in front of the sweaty VM in Helsinki?

Not trying to be obtuse, I really don't get how other providers can compete with that, I can't imagine Vercel's CDN is so significantly superior to make it worth it.

For that matter, the entire site could be in a Cloudflare worker with all the content in R2 (no egress fees, just storage). Likely to barely exceed the $5 baseline price for a paid account. (not sure on the storage costs, but likely well under $100/mo)

Yes, and I didn't mean to imply that a single VPS is all you needed. But I wanted to put things into perspective for the other posters who claimed that you couldn't possibly serve a site like this from a single machine, purely in terms of performance.

Some people don't realize how big machines get. A single ordinary server can have a 4x100Gbps connection and 256 physical CPU cores.

That's not worth 45k. It's barely worth anything for a typical website, tbh.