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17 Comments

Is Vercel becoming the Google of web dev?

https://twitter.com/gdbroman/status/1546061777896517632
submitted this linkon July 10, 2022
  1. 5

    No lol..most serious companies host on aws, azure or gcp. Vercel and its lot may be fine for simple static projects but as soon as you need compute (i.e. 48, 96 etc core machines, gpus), data lakes etc you move to one of the big 3 vendors.

    1. 3

      Agree with this. And lower end you are really competing with no code/low code/WordPress.

    2. 2

      Not a 100% on this, but I think vercel also hosts on AWS. Correct me if I'm wrong

      1. 2

        They use AWS for some of their hosting, yes. AWS is the defacto standard

    3. 1

      Just to mitigate this: you can move to one of the big 3 and still use Vercel for frontends app, because it has a low maintenance cost and can have a low operation cost as well if you optimize your website correctly

  2. 3

    What do you mean when you say "Google of web dev"? I know Google made Angular but that didn't quite take off...

    1. 1

      In the Google-as-a-monopoly sense :D

  3. 2

    Vercel is amazing - it streamlines so many items. It makes Next.js app deployment simple

  4. 2

    I love Vercel as a user but if we're talking about their business then they don't have a strong enough moat to be a real monopoly. For someone just using Vercel for static site deployment, it's really easy for them to switch to Netlify or whatever.

  5. 2

    Interesting take!

  6. 1

    🚀🤟🏻🏄🏻‍♂️

  7. 1

    They are good for static websites but their static website forms solution kinda sucks ( in my humble opinion), which is good for us as fabform.io plays nice with Vercel, Netlify, Render and the other static website hosting solutions.

  8. 1

    Vercel has a specialization in frontend architecture/backend for frontend. Everything they do is heavily targeted at websites, not web in a broader sense that also includes APIs. I don't think it's designed to support data science workloads for instance.
    You can still host backends without UI, it's a good serverless host, but serverless is a specific pattern that do not suit all use cases.

    Also it's not Google in the monopolistic meaning, it has significant competition: Netlify, Fly for instance and many others

    1. 1

      Vercel has a specialization in frontend architecture

      Yup, true! Definitely don't see Vercel becoming AWS/GCP any time soon, it's clear they're focusing on frontend/serverless.

  9. 1

    Nah, it is the distance between the earth and sky.

  10. 1

    Um...WordPress?

  11. 1

    no...? I only use Netlify...