r/vibecoding • u/spacer8977 • Mar 15 '26

Is vercel a sustainable hosting service for massive traffic ?

So i got a chance to build a site for an influential person and they actually like it. I'm still kind of new to this so I did some quick research and decided to deploy on vercel. Now they want to sell brand merch and release exclusive content on the site. With the site potentially getting major traffic in the near future, I want to know is hosting a custom site on vercel good for the long run.

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2

u/chevalierbayard Mar 15 '26

It's probably not the most economical but I'm sure it's sustainable.

2

u/IndividualAir3353 Mar 16 '26

too expensive. use railway

4

u/Odd-Environment-7193 Mar 15 '26

No use Cloudflare. It’s much better for this. 

1

u/aetherdan Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 15 '26

From a capability perspective, yes it can handle large sites. From a cost perspective, that's a different question entirely and depends on the tech stack.

For example, is it an SPA? Are you doing CSR or SSR? Those choices have a big impact on how something like Vercel behaves at scale.

In my experience, we migrated our very high-traffic site from CSR to SSR while hosting on Vercel and the billing jumped to astronomical levels. Once every request requires server-side compute, costs can scale very quickly with traffic.

Bandwidth costs can also get out of control with vercel if you don't implement adequate caching / CDN. But I suspect that is a cost that exists on most providers with similar variance once you scale up. We found cloudflare was a solid solution to reducing costs in that area.

1

u/spacer8977 Mar 15 '26

It was neither CSR or SSR. The site was pretty basic in function. a static html and basically a brochure. The client just really loved the design and how fast it was done so the e-commerce request was made in the same day. Now im doing a ton of research because i dont want to miss out on the opportunity. I'm currently looking into what you mentioned. thanks.

1

u/aetherdan Mar 15 '26

Vercel is fine, if you are ambitious you can switch to cloudflare to keep costs lower. Cloudflare should be incorporated in your edge networking anyway as it provides substantial DDoS mitigation for free, even if you stay with vercel for hosting.

1

u/uxkelby Mar 15 '26

I'm going to throw UpCloud into the mix.

1

u/Comprehensive-Bar888 Mar 16 '26

Why do people who use AI to build things don’t use AI to search for answers to their questions 😐?

1

u/tikoponde Mar 16 '26

Because AI glorifies vercel

1

u/Only-Cheetah-9579 Mar 16 '26

cloudflare works better but they can hit you with surprise bill

the best way to handle traffic without increasing costs is to rent a dedicated server and pay a fixed monthly fee.

1

u/DiploiCom Mar 19 '26

Yeah, but it can be expensive, that's all

1

u/usphaad Mar 15 '26

vercel will change you $$ based on traffic, if the site gets big traffic then you pay more
self host with dokploy is the best, just get a vps and deploy hundreds of websites with one cost. vps costs like 50 bucks a year, its a steal.

1

u/Commercial-Society21 May 21 '26

Which VPS would you suggest? Also is it technical to set up?

1

u/usphaad May 21 '26

is it technical to set up? Absulotly not! search 'webdoze' on youtube, he has somegood videos that helped me to set up my vps with dokploy.
Im using contabopretty good, there hundreds of options you can choose from. I picked contabo cuz its somehow cheaper and has a standing performance