Why not bare metal servers or VPS from like... DigitalOcean? What is DigitalOcean missing for your use case/preference specifically compared to Next + Vercel?
I'm not a DigitalOcean shill or employee, I'm just curious what I'm missing from a "what do other competitors out there offer".
I always thought it was like... spinup Debian/Ubuntu VPS, ssh to it, install Docker, run docker-compose or Docker Swarm or... Terraform?
If you scroll down a little there's a section titled "Out-of-the-box features" that answers your question. I think the edge functions would be the hardest thing to do on your own.
For just the hosting, maybe. But there's so much more Heroku does, from spinning up test environments for PRs to storing secret keys (across different repos) to being a CI to monitoring to... so so much more.
Hooking up some kind of CI/CD to GitHub through webhooks
> storing secret keys
Built into GitHub (or an instance of Hashicorp Vault which can be hosted for free)
> to monitoring
Can run your own Grafana/Promtheus
Obviously there's a cost running all of this yourself as opposed to just paying them to do it. Just making sure I wasn't missing something obvious tradeoff wise between "our company would rather pay somebody to manage all of this for us"
> Services like Herokus are useful because they save hundreds of hours of sysops.
Which they know, and can charge you accordingly for, right?
If a single sysop engineer cost $100k/yr (without anybody managing them), they can charge you $50k/yr to replace them and it'd still be a steal, right?
Assuming they have no competition, yes. But now they're not just competing with sysops, they're also completing with a bunch of other app platforms. None of the others are quite as full featured, but if the competitors can save 80% of the sysops time at 20% of the cost, Heroku will see people switching away.
As someone who does what you suggest, it's great but it is a lot of overhead and not zero click. Updates, reboots, lambda functionality (autoscale, blue/green, etc) and database hosting is always complex.
I'm not a DigitalOcean shill or employee, I'm just curious what I'm missing from a "what do other competitors out there offer".
I always thought it was like... spinup Debian/Ubuntu VPS, ssh to it, install Docker, run docker-compose or Docker Swarm or... Terraform?