[Lucasoato]

I really don’t understand how people can trust platforms like Vercel, Fly.io over robust could providers like Cloudflare, AWS or Azure.

I mean, Vercel has its usefulness, it’s so well integrated with the NextJS stack, it totally makes sense for small amateurish projects since it saves you time and money… but once you want to push to production, have real customers and satisfy them reliably, these platforms can’t compete with the big ones.

[oefrha]

This is what happens when you do HN-frontpage-driven development. I mean, they use Bun (which I’m sure will be great in a couple years’ time) and quickly ran into an fd leak in it. Does that sound like a production grade runtime?

However, I suppose it’s good for content marketing. You’re not going to make front page by choosing boring old technology (unless you’re migrating back to boring old technology after failed HN-frontpage-driven development).

[ushakov]

Their stack speaks for itself:

Next.js, TailwindCSS, shadcn/ui, tinybird, turso, drizzle, clerk, Resend

That’s for an app which sends a ping to a URL every x minutes…

[hipadev23]

> That’s for an app which sends a ping to a URL every x minutes…

My bigger question is: How the fuck do these companies keep getting created? There's gotta be more uptime-monitor SaaS companies than todo MVC demos in existence.

[ushakov]

Because these people are bad businessmen. There is not a single reason yet another uptime monitoring business needs to exist. They have no chance at succeeding the likes of Datadog, New Relic.

Conclusion: promising builders being bad at startups

[rozenmd]

Who says they have to reach Datadog/New Relic scale to "succeed"?

[ushakov]

You’re right. I will take it back. Was just upset

[tmikaeld]

It’s easy to get the free users, where of just a smaller % need to upgrade to keep you afloat. Then there’s the possibility to upsell other related services like analytics or logs.

Betterstack did this very well.

[ushakov]

> a smaller % need to upgrade to keep you afloat

Until yet another free competitor comes along. Then you're out of business

[dboreham]

> I really don’t understand how people can trust platforms like Vercel

It's not an apples to apples choice. The people who use Vercel don't know anything about how to deploy on AWS. That's the whole point of Vercel. Whether or not they can be trusted is really orthogonal to the reason they were selected as a provider. But that said, they're just a layer over AWS so why should they be significantly less trustworthy? I haven't used Vercel in production, but I have used a similar "layer over AWS" service (Aptible). The problem where wasn't to do with QoS or support, but rather that the narrowing of the functionality of the "interface" (which is pretty much the point) ends up causing frustration when you want to integrate with other stuff you're doing in AWS.

[Swizec]

> The people who use Vercel don't know anything about how to deploy on AWS

Ehhhh. I’ve been deploying to AWS professionally for years and I’d choose Vercel for a personal project any day of the week.

Life’s too short to play devops/sysadmin/sre without someone paying you the big bucks.

[bingemaker]

This. Anyone who has done enough ops knows that a platform (Vercel, Heroku, Netlify etc) which lets devs connect a git repo with a couple of clicks, and deploys automatically happen is a good devops experience.

This is great for personal projects. This is great for budding projects in a professional setup as well.

[Swizec]

If I never again have to write a httpd.conf or nginx.conf file from scratch it will be too soon.

[OJFord]

Either you mean 'too late' or that's a complicated way of making a dissenting point?

[Swizec]

It’s an idiom that means I never want to do this again. Even if I waited an infinite amount of time, it would still be too soon to have to write httpd.conf or nginx.conf files again.

https://hinative.com/questions/337452

[elforce002]

This x100. I use gcp, DO, and Vultr, for almost everything (ml, be, vas, etc.) but for webapps, vercel wins 9/10 times.

[elliotec]

Vercel is great for pre-prod ethereal environments for testing and CI. But they desperately want to sell you their enterprise stack which is completely inadequate, and will drag their feet for months if you just want to sign the damn “pro” version.

[crooked-v]

Also, simple stuff like bandwidth is wildly overpriced with Vercel. My company switched away from all their magic image resizing stuff because as our traffic increased the bandwidth was 10x that of doing all media content through Prismic.

[judge2020]

Vercel is hosted on AWS, and they're definitely not in the business of subsidizing AWS per-GB costs. Although the >2x markup is egregious ($40/100gb aka $0.40/gb over 1tb, versus AWS' $0.15/gb in its most expensive region, Sao Paulo, Brazil).

[teddyh]

Some people avoid large providers, since large providers have approximately no incentive whatsoever to keep you, specifically, as a customer. I.e. large providers will happily raise their prices, alter the deal, throw you under the bus, disable your account, delete all you data and then refuse to talk to you. They can do this because, when they look at the big picture, you don’t matter to them. And since doing this saves them some money, they all do it.

[kunley]

Right. Plus, large providers usually don't offer support for small-sized instances/containers/whatever, so even if you optimized your deployment to use less resources, you need to buy a bigger thing.

But to the main point: using an extra layer which is on the top of said large provider, like here Vercel over AWS, is not a solution, as this middle man also can be marginalized by the big bully at some moment.

This is why I prefer small providers, like Vultr. (Not affiliated with them in any way; just a happy customer).

[MuteXR]

And a small service can go under anytime, without any real warning.

Most big providers end up being cheaper for you as well. Vercel is insanely expensive.

[teddyh]

> And a small service can go under anytime, without any real warning.

Both large and small providers could make the ground from under your feet disappear, in different ways. But only the small provider has a real incentive to actually keep you, as just one customer. It’s only when a small provider goes out of business completely that you have any risk. And that’s unlikely to happen, unless they’re delusional or funded by squirrel-minded VCs – which are things you can determine beforehand.

[junon]

I worked at ZEIT (before it became Vercel) and if they've retained even a 10th of their engineering culture then they're solid, if not a bit "niche" in what and who they target.

Anecdotal, sure, but it'd be hard to quantify it.

[reducesuffering]

It’s funny how frontend has a stigma of less serious engineering when the caliber of programming being done at Vercel is far beyond the level of inadequacy I’ve seen being in big tech FAANG eng departments.

[KRAKRISMOTT]

Modern day frontend is ridiculously complex. Back in the day, the only compilers that tried to do code splitting and optimization across network boundaries were ASP.NET WebForms and similar. They were dreadfully simplistic compared to the SSR+ react-streaming-over-the-wire that Vercel is doing. Don't get me wrong, the React compiler written in Rust is leagues ahead of the slow tech in for example the angular world, but it is also magnitudes more complex.

I see this as a side effect of developing economies in the world coming online. When you have to service millions in places with poor network and provide a competitive UX, you don't have the luxury of going with "simple" solutions.

[arcanemachiner]

I think this comment is intended as a compliment to Vercel, but it's hard to tell from the wording.

[reducesuffering]

Apologies. Yes, big tech == overrated, Vercel tech == underrated

[OJFord]

It's 'beyond the level of inadequacy' which is amusingly ambiguous!

[globalise83]

They reliably exceed 99.99% inadequacy overachievement - there, made it less ambiguous for you.

[meiraleal]

'use server'

sql("select * from db");

This is what Vercel is pushing into React code. The caliber of their work is low, very low. They are con masters with MBAs

[junon]

They are objectively not that, lol. If you don't like what they're doing I understand but please don't disrespect people you don't know.

[meiraleal]

That's what you get for working in a famous company that took over an open source software.

If the destruction of React by Vercel paid your bills and you feel disrespected by my total despise for this get rich fast schema (a la crypto rugpulls), that's a problem for you to solve, not me.

Edit: but in reality I'm happy and thankful to Vercel for imploding React, it helped me to finally check that there are so many better options nowadays.

[junon]

How did Vercel "destroy" React? How are they a "get rich quick" "rugpull"?

Respectfully, you have no idea what you're talking about.

[reducesuffering]

Dan Abramov, de facto lead for React, said that the React team was driving the vision behind the new features in React. Vercel just said, "how can we help? You guys think server components are great, ok, we'll make them first class as that's where the React ecosystem is headed."

Vercel is doing nothing but trying to improve DX for all the things people complain about React.

[aurareturn]

I started using Next.js in 2017. It made React a real production framework. Prior to Next.js, React was hard to setup and maintain and hard to make it go fast (on first load). Next.js solved the worst React problems.

I don't think it ruined React at all. I think it helped React gain in popularity - which you might interpret as "destruction".

[refulgentis]

That's awesome work. You don't like it for aesthetic reasons, pre-conceptions of aesthetic purity. That's fine too and I think I agree. But it's awesome work.

[meiraleal]

Go ahead. It is all yours, awesome work is simple work. Vercel wants React to do everything so they can sell everything. Not to me. That was a sad takeover of an open source project tho

[Rapzid]

I like to joke that because Vercel doesn't make money when you run components in the client, and React is now made for Vercel, that React is now developed for backends.

I'm a big fan of OSS projects being sponsored by companies that use them for a higher level business. Vs a ton of the C# ecosystem where they try to sell you the library/framework.

But hosting businesses ain't it when it comes to frameworks.. It creates weird incentives.

[mattnewton]

Plenty of people end up building vercel-but-worse out of CI pipelines on aws or similar, doesn’t strike me as crazy to keep using it well past the prototype stage for projects that for its constraints.

[infecto]

Whats the use case for edge computing like Fly.io. I have yet to figure it out the use case where a edge provider is necessary. That is, having a database on the edge.

[simonw]

Having customers in places around the world. If you site is hosted in North Virginia, and you have customers in Australia, they are going to really suffer from the speed of light.

[infecto]

Definitely. I guess where my ignorance comes in, from an engineering perspective is the way fly.io thinks about edge databases more difficult to architect than a more traditional route creating a subdomain for a region and just replicating your entire infrastructure in a new <insert cloud provider> region?

I guess you can setup the same kind of structure inside of fly.io but I remember some of their writeups have been talking about deployment and pushing the DB to the edge and then having eventual consistency across?

I think that is my hangup on use cases.

[ushakov]

That’s very rare though. Unless you’re Shopify, location doesn’t really matter

[x0x0]

Common enough to have a couple customers in the EU or apac who consistently complain that your site is glacial and it turns out to be pretty bad for them...

[x0x0]

Lots of us (well, me at least) use fly because it's a bundled set of aws best practices that I could configure in aws if I wanted to, but I'd waste another week of my life. alb + various vpcs + autoscaling group + fargate + ecs + their super shitty vpn service to vpn to a console + rds + elasticache or... just type "fly deploy" and go from zero to live in 20 minutes.

That said, fly's deploys are flaky. I hope they get it fixed because the rest of the service is pretty good.

[infecto]

The first part is good to hear. And the last part is the only reason I have not consistently used them. As an aside, I have started to use chatgpt heavily for aws questions and walkthroughs. Have been using ECS heavily and this has been super helpful for me to get through what I consider the hardbits, non-obvious permissions and configurations that aws that does tell you about but is buried in the documentation for a json like configuration object.

[maxbond]

You could have your realtime competitive FPS game like Call of Duty host the data and compute necessary to run a match as close to the median location of all the players involved as possible to reduce latency. You could make the same case for something like Zoom or a collaborative editing tool.

[pjmlp]

Several SaaS companies are pushing for Next.js as their main SDK, that is how real customers end up in Vercel.

[intelVISA]

The only platform you can truly trust is the one you handcraft down to the NAND gates.

[preciousoo]

If you’re not mining your lithium and cobalt with your own handmade pickaxe you’re doing it wrong

[paradox460]

If you don't have your own star spitting out bespoke elements, are you really doing it at all, or just using someone else's work

[leerob]

Edit: Nevermind, wrong thread. Vercel does honor DCMA, of course, though.

[jiayo]

You work at Vercel. Are you saying Vercel does not honour DMCA takedown requests and that is a selling point of using Vercel? This seems like a strange thing to brag about.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> This seems like a strange thing to brag about.

Not to me, it isn't.

There are plenty of areas-of-interest that attract both hobbyists and serious academics alike - which also tends to attract unwanted attention from callous legal departments who are keep to adopt a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy - things like (lawful) research into DRM techniques, retro video-games (and not ROM hosting), infosec disclosures, and so on - so if you're really into those areas and want a safe place for your lawful content but without worrying about your site/content/services being taken-down without good cause then it makes sense to side with a provider who is able to resist DMCA requests.