Vercel is really damn convenient
I recently got bit by the "remake your personal site" bug and ended up building a sweet new blog site using a really, really sweet new framework called Astro.
While building this site and thinking about whether I wanted to deploy it on my Oracle Cloud Free Tier VPS, and how unwieldy that platform is. I thought maybe looking into Vercel would be a good idea, if at least to explore and learn a new platform.
For the longest time I stayed away from Vercel. I’ve always preferred setting my servers up from scratch, mostly to get more practice, and I wasn’t sold on “serverless” deployments.
Now, I already knew their platform had excellent support for these hot new JavaScript frameworks, and man am I glad I looked further into it.
Pricing
First off, for hobby projects, they offer an extremely generous free plan. I can deploy a large amount of projects on there for free. Of course, there are limitations to this, but they are very generous.
Their “Pro” plan starts at just $20 per month at the time of writing, which is absolutely insane considering how much value it provides. Unlimited environments? DDoS protection? Yes, please!
Convenience
It’s so damn easy to use. It integrates with my Github account, I pick a repo that I wish to deploy, few clicks here and there, and BAM! My site is live - with a TLS certificate too.
My site got set up with a CD pipeline right into production. I just need to push my code onto the project’s main branch and Vercel pulls it automatically to update my site. It’s the easiest set-up I’ve ever experienced.
Closing thoughts
I’ve yet to deploy other, perhaps less Vercel-supported technologies, but if they are all this easy to deploy, this platform is set to explode (even more than it has).
I am now a believer. Will report back in the future.