Next/Vercel vs. Website Builders
Possibly a long rehashed question, and I know this might not be the best channel -- I'm trying to figure out my own style as a web dev, and currently building a portfolio with lots of pro bono work, mostly for NGO's in West Africa. With limited operational costs, I always feel conflicted choosing between a website builder and hosting on vercel. The majority the work is simple navigation, which could be accomplished with SSR. Very little javascript. No auth, no login, no DB, etc.
Can someone help me walk through the pros and cons?
Vercel Pros:
- Very cheap (free?) hosting.
- I get to practice Next & React which is the whole point of the portfolio anyway.
Vercel Cons:
- Handing off to a future dev? Long term sustainability? (this is a big sticking point for me) - Building in a Headless CMS would be extra work.
Vercel Cons:
- Handing off to a future dev? Long term sustainability? (this is a big sticking point for me) - Building in a Headless CMS would be extra work.
12 Replies
vercel is more of a deployment platform in a sense
if your content is mainly static or with small upgrades, you can consider astro (and can deploy on vercel + other providers)
like this
James Ross (@CherryJimbo)
🎉 One of the best things about @Cloudflare Workers is the extremely predictable billing.
1 Million Requests? $0.50
20 Million Requests? $10
🤯 That's it. No GB-s nonsense with CPU wall time (outside of Unbound). The Bundled pricing model with @CloudflareDev Workers is so good
Twitter
Ok awesome, yeah thank you.
Also another noob question...
Is it always preferable to build a nav bar (potentially two tier) with pure CSS over JS ?
build it with what is necessary
if with only css is enough, that is good
if you need js, add as you need
perhaps the better question is, what are the limitations of a pure-css nav
I'm formerly a requirements engineer, so that answer cracks me up a bit.
but for sure get what you mean. Thanks for the responses.
with pure-css you kinda don't have the js interactivity
like need to show a dropdown? you kinda need js
dynamically showing items? you need js
ok yeah makes sense.
Thanks for the lead on Astro and CF workers.
didn't know CF workers was so cheap.
you have lots of limitations on that
but overall its dirt cheap
isnt like vercel is that expensive either
another option is deploying to github pages
Astro Documentation
Deploy your Astro Site to GitHub Pages
How to deploy your Astro site to the web using GitHub Pages.
idk 100% about that but its a option
any thought on handoff / long-term maintainence ? Am I married to each of these projects ?
assuming so
depends a lot with that client intent, the project and what you want to do