What would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $200 a month?
Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even cleanly compare usage. With render/railway/(insert provider of choice) you can at least predict that you're your biggest cost is going to be egress.
edit: I just saw that it gets 450m pageviews. I'm guessing on the upper end this costs ~$1k with railway + cloudflare?
Why not bare-cloud? Esp with AI... in 10min or less an agent can deploy almost any stack to an optimal AWS setup for a fraction of the cost of any platform.
While I used to think Railway was an amazing service, I had a production workload get broken because they removed a feature without any depreciation period or warning. I now struggle to recommend it for anything more than a hobby project. Vercel has the benifit of being big enough they have to do things properly. For reference https://station.railway.com/questions/smtp-connection-failur...
I would stay away from any startup for production workload.
Made the mistake. Never again.
Fly, railway, render. Avoid. All have weird show stopper bugs for any reasonable scale and you will fight against the platform compared to using big cloud.
And big cloud works better even in cases where PAAS is advertised as simpler (google cloud run and build is as easy to setup as railway but you have much more knobs to control traffic, routing, roll out etc)
The pricing is so bad I had to remove my CC details. One mistake and you wake up with a 50K bill for your personal project that was just you exploring.
500 at hetzner, they don't go up to that price, and even with their prices raised during the RAM shortage, for 500, you can still have 5 servers each with 4TB NVMe and 128GB RAM, and a Ryzen 9 7950X3D (16 cores).
Seems like their setup price has gone up from 1 month to 2.5 months. Ouch. That'll be to cover the RAM price.
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)
The post said 450 million pageviews, likely since November. If we make very generous assumptions and assume that each pageview is a megabyte (very generous based on my own experience scanning billions of websites), then that's 450TB total in traffic. If you really did 450TB per month in traffic, you would need slightly more than one gigabit line (and hence VPS), but not more than two. With Hetzner the traffic would cost you €450 or $535.
Well, https://jmail.world/jacebook-logo.png is 670KB by itself and loaded on initial load, so I think they might have blown your suggested traffic budget and still have some optimization to do.
Fair enough, I just loaded some pages and some of them are even bigger than 2MB. But then again those static resources would be cached client-side. So unless you have 450 million unique visitors who only ever go to one URL on your site, you are looking at significantly less per pageview. I reloaded the frontpage with caching enabled and it was ~ 30kB of data transfer.
For high traffic check places like datapacket (no affiliation), or slightly cheaper, places like onlyservers (no paid affiliation, was a customer) or even find a transit provider and a colo and a server yourself. For $535 a month or less you can get a pretty good amount of bandwidth.
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.
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.
It's Vercel, it's their business model. They have all the minnows eating for free, and then once you pass a threshold, you're a whale with a whale–sized bill.
Say what you want about Elon but X is where all the investors and tech execs are. Nobody is going to sign up for threads because they saw it link to a picture in a HN post
unfortunately it's also where the signal is distorted by the noise of a thousand blue check hangers-on who add nothing to the comment thread besides "great job, Mr CEO!", "this is a game changer", and other unquestioning platitudes.
Readit News
Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even cleanly compare usage. With render/railway/(insert provider of choice) you can at least predict that you're your biggest cost is going to be egress.
edit: I just saw that it gets 450m pageviews. I'm guessing on the upper end this costs ~$1k with railway + cloudflare?
Made the mistake. Never again.
Fly, railway, render. Avoid. All have weird show stopper bugs for any reasonable scale and you will fight against the platform compared to using big cloud.
And big cloud works better even in cases where PAAS is advertised as simpler (google cloud run and build is as easy to setup as railway but you have much more knobs to control traffic, routing, roll out etc)
Seems like their setup price has gone up from 1 month to 2.5 months. Ouch. That'll be to cover the RAM price.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
It's like if Dropbox was an rsync server (no app) and it cost $10,000 a month for 1TB of space. Think it would still take off?
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...
450 million pageviews on a single 16c/32t OVH box with nginx and a 3 Gbps connection = $245
Did I get something wrong?
Edit: dang, even pngcrush can't get it below 580 KB. Disappointing performance on PNG's part.
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.
Definitely not just static content.
And with the entire world perusing this archive, I'm sure the costs will be very high, regardless of provider.
you may find it useful to check on costs (among other useful stuff like widgets)
https://github.com/revcel/revcel
Say what you want about Elon but X is where all the investors and tech execs are. Nobody is going to sign up for threads because they saw it link to a picture in a HN post
>Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail' as it has become the number 1 site for tracking the Epstein files
and the expense is 46,486 USD. He said he is happy to cover expenses and that Vercel worked good for your needs.