[no_wizard]

Their moat may be from a technical perspective thin, however with that said, if you do deploy Next.js on Vercel with all the nice things that comes with out of the box, it’s hard to beat. And GCP, AWS nor Azure make it as out of the box seamless and keeps it that way as things scale.

The big cloud providers “solutions” around this all fall short introducing mindless complexity to upsell you more services often with half baked integration

[satvikpendem]

I can use their NextJS Docker container anywhere though. Currently I do it on a Hetzner VPS for a few bucks a month and handle all the scale I need, no CDN or edge runtime required.

[steve_taylor]

It’s worth using a CDN to reduce server load and increase your website’s speed. Cloudflare is free for most use cases and ridiculously easy to set up.

[CoolCold]

But they insist on put your NS on cloudflare as well and afair not accepting domains greater than 2nd level.

Coming back to the load - simple 3vCPU Linux based VPS on Hetzner could handle 4Gbit of traffic serving. Offloading your server fleet probably the last reason here. Geo presence - agree here.

[steve_taylor]

It's pretty easy to beat using GitHub Actions, a VPS host such as DigitalOcean, and a CDN such as Cloudflare or Bunny.net.

You almost never need a serverless runtime when you're starting out. If you're building a SaaS, then your need to scale will be proportional to your revenue and you can easily afford to vertically and horizontally scale within your VPS provider using a small fraction of your subscription revenue. By the time you need to go serverless, you can afford to pay someone else to do it.