This is positioned to be competing product to netlify and vercel. However, it doesn't make sense to host it yourself as core benefit of host a static pages and node js apps on netlify is use their CDN infrastructure. It would actually cost you more to host self host it than using alternatives. Also this is definitely not a PaaS substitute. It is great attempt at a netlify alternative, but fall very short from being a production grade platform. Just an analysis, don't burn me please.
Atm, it's not aiming to be a production-grade system. Indie hackers, hobbyists, probably do not need that to start working on their side project. Also, I'm thinking of provide a hosted version of it, but not know. I want to concentrate on the features now.
When I saw it described as a "heroku and netlify alternatives", I assumed it was meant to be a production-grade system, that's what those words mean to me.
If those are wrong expectations, you might consider changing your marketing.
I don't know what up with people these days. There seems to be a trend people are building heroku clones. Heroku is more than buildpack and dynos. Just because you have a github integration does not mean you do not have the right to call yourself a heroku alternative. Whole point of heroku is getting started without any setup. Now, If I have to acquire a VM, setup the infrastructure and then setup one these "alternatives", the onus is on me. I am responsible for 80% of the task heroku does. At that point, I would rather own it 100%. There is lot of stuff that goes on behind the scene goes into Heroku or Netlify. Managed Kubernetes with a PaaS experience comes very close of heroku alternative however, why would you switch to something like that when you are content with Heroku. Kubernetes setup will become a beast in itself.
I think heroku's alternative business plan should be suing all the companies/people calling themselves publicly calling themselves heroku alternative or a better heroku and delivering subpar projects.
If lots of people are having expectations that you didn't meant to give them and don't want to meet, that could get inconvenient for everyone including you, regardless of whether you want to blame it on a "them problem". So it might make sense to adjust the marketing to better set expectations. But that's your call, you can also just deal with it knowing that it's their fault for misunderstanding you.
Worth noting that Netlify's CDN recently had issues. I do think Netlify is nice, but "production grade" sounds like something that might require two providers.
Netlify are on multiple providers, but due to the DNS spec being old ( no CNAMEs at root) many providers respecting it without providing CNAME flattening, in some cases you have to give use a regular old IP as an A record, hence the impact of the GCP load balancer being down.
If one was using CNAME flattening, there was zero impact.
Why not 3? It is about how paranoid you want to be about uptime. Uptime and production grade are two different things. There is certain uptime guarantees that a cloud provider will give. Production grade is durability of the product itself.
Algorithms that tolerate Byzantine failures generally require t<n/3, i.e. at least 4 nodes to tolerate 1 byzantine fault. This is in fact required for primitives as simple as reliable broadcast. Systems that use leader election such as Raft are not Byzantine tolerant. They tolerate t<n/2, meaning that 3 nodes does indeed buy tolerance to 1 crash, but it doesn't support anything else than crashes.
Couldn't you pair it with, say, Cloudflare? Perhaps something like that is coming functionality within the product, but it's easy enough to do yourself for now.
Why not AWS for that matter. There is difference between IaaS and PaaS. This is more in the realm of PaaS. You cannot compare with infrastructure providers per say, in my opinion.
Not true. For hobby projects, using netlify and heroku is often cheaper, agreed. But for serious organization it might be cheaper. Heroku's standard 2x dynos pricing is $50 per month [1]i.e 1GB mem, whereas a droplet in digitalocean is $5 per month for the same resources[2] with 1000GB storage. Lets add loadbalancer to the mix additional $10 per month, domain and SSL certs are negligible prices, max would be $20 per month. It comes at the price of engineering time.
What does it take to host this on Cloudfront or Cloudflare? Are they not the same thing as Vercel? What is the difference if I hosted a website on those two former providers vs Vercel?
