When I began programming websites I quickly found that most people used Vercel to deploy their websites because it was extremely easy to deploy to, fast, on the edge and just an overall great developer experience. So I gave it a try and it was everything it was cracked up to be fast, easy to deploy great DX, but I wanted to learn more. I am a very avid learner as humans we should constantly be learning knew things on a daily basis. Seeing as I’m an avid learner I wanted to learn how Vercel works and soon found out it was simply a wrapper around AWS (Amazon Web Services.) I then thought to myself,
Why not cut out the middleman?
AWS Dev Experience Sucks
As a beginner web developer when researching which hosting provider to choose you will quickly realize most tech influencers recommend one of the big three AWS, Microsoft Azure or GCP (Google Cloud Provider.) The most common reasons for this being: Scalability, Reliability, Security and Services. Seeing as AWS was the “best” in all of these categories I decided to go with it. Before deploying my website I wanted to know how much it would cost, as I logged on to the AWS website I saw a 12-month free tier offer. (There is nothing free about the free tier)
The “Free Tier” is not free
I was broke as a joke so I was happy to know that the free tier would let me run some zero-traffic web apps for FREE. I spun up a Lambda Function along with an RDS (Relational Database Service) and ElastiCache instance to cache stuff for my website. After about a week of not even being able to query my DB (Database) because of the god awfully slow reads and not being able to connect to my Elasticache instance at all; I got an alert from my AWS budget tracker thingamabob telling me my $20 budget had been exceeded I checked my balance and I owed $50, on the free tier. I now understand Elasticache and most of RDS isn’t on the free tier, but in my defense the pricing is extremely confusing and it’s unclear what the hell is even included in the free tier. I mean creating an EC2 Instance tells me what is and isn’t included in the free tier but that’s about it, everything else is kinda just like maybe I’m on the free tier maybe I’m not.
Terrible Documentation
I also created an S3 (Simple Storage Service) Bucket to store images and stuff, my backend was written in Go at the time because I wanted to try out a new language and it was easy to learn. After creating the S3 Bucket I wanted to upload files from the Go backend to the bucket, after reading the documentation I realized the was pretty much no documentation for the AWS Golang SDK. I followed the examples exactly read the docs to understand what the functions were how they were to be used and yet could not get it to work (skill issue.) I thought it was just a me problem until I checked on StackOverflow and found many people running into the same problems as me and complaining about the lack of documentation and undocumented fixes. The amount of times I have run into a problem with an AWS service or SDK and found an undocumented problem on StackOverflow is infuriating.
Alternatives
This article isn’t just a rant about my bad experiences with AWS believe it or not, rather a message that you may not need AWS, all of its services or scalability. If you just spin up a Lambda to run a static website with NextJS or Astro, you could just as easily spin up a Cloudflare Worker and not get charged for DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. As long as you don’t get to big for the Pro tier you can be sure your app won’t be shut down.
Real free tier
Unlike the AWS “Free Tier” Cloudflare Workers have an actual free tier that allows up to 10 million requests a month without the need to enter a card so you can be sure you won’t be charged. Cloudflare isn’t just for static apps either it comes with an SQL database, KV store for caching, as well as Object storage and a ton of other cool features. Not to mention they actually have documentation, including framework specific documentation for frameworks such as NextJS, Vite and Astro just to name a few. Another one of the biggest upsides to Cloudflare Workers is they run on the edge with almost zero cold start time due to them being built on top of V8 Isolates as opposed to a heavier runtime such as Bun or Deno. While this makes for ultrafast startups it does limit the functionality of the workers. Your web app will probably run fine if it doesn’t do any heavy computation or large database queries. However, any app which requires heavy computation or large database interactions Workers probably aren’t a good fit.
Stop sleeping on Cloudflare
This makes Workers sound limited to most people and is the reason most people simply purchase their domain from Cloudflare to take advantage of the DDoS protection and the host with another provider; but most websites don’t require large DB queries or lots of computation and run just fine on the edge. Which makes most websites a perfect fit for Cloudflare. If you haven’t already I would recommend atleast starting up a side project with Cloudflare and giving it a try! (Not sponsored btw)