Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway?
Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.
>Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway?
Because you literally connect to a git repo and your site is deployed, and scales with load. Compared to managing a VM, system and application packages, config, backups and then how do you scale that?
I have what is basically a demo running on Vercel free tier, there's no way I'm maintaining a VM for that lol.
If I had a serious site, same. If I had a team, then the equation would be different.
This is the Dropbox problem. People are willing to pay for convenience, and tech folks tend to underestimate how much convenience comes from seemingly simple solutions
it literally is though that's why i'm confused. you pay a flat monthly fee and get a box that runs linux. yes you might not be able to press one button and Effortlessly Deploy Your AI-Managed SaaS Infrastructure Product To Valued Customers Across The Metaverse or whatever vercel does but it only takes a couple hours to learn how to setup nginx node rsync and cloudflare (and even then i think there's some easier closer to one-click solutions)
also developing an app is something you need to be quite tech savvy to do anyway. genuinely are there really people who have the skill and patience to do that and then get stumped trying to deploy it? clearly there are since stuff like this is so popular I just don't really understand
I think the free/cheap tier is what gets people kind of hooked... it's really easy to setup something like Dokku self-hosted and run a few dozen apps on a decent rented server... Even then, there's something appealing about not having to even worry about it. Why bother setting up your own server(s) and databases when you can run in Cloudflare workers with CockroachLabs or Turso?
Even with my own server, I've explored the option(s) just to avoid potential pain down the road regarding excess load.
Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.