For me, the main things are:

- Vercel will do some decent scaling - Vercel will do feature branch environments, so users can preview how the software will look before merging code into master/main - Vercel maintain NextJS, which is a good thing if you use it

When you look back on the history of what you hosted, was the overall price you paid for automatic scaling worth it?

In my experience, running a web application on a VM which can handle 10x the normal load is pretty cheap. And occurences where a traffic spike is more than 10x the normal load are so rare (once every couple of years) that I can deal with it manually.

Everyone fancies their success, which means more visitors. They want to be able to handle the odd traffic surge. Understandable desires.

But understanding of scaling seems stuck in 2012 when these systems were required for even moderate sites, particularly if slow frameworks are being used. The rise of cloud use is definitely part of this mentality. An ingrained believe that horizontal scaling via vendor is the only way.

But meanwhile, in 2023 where we've seen a 500x bump in what servers are capable of and vertical scaling and it's simplicity can just "get you there" for 99% of sites.

For me it's more that hopefully I don't need to worry about being hugged or randomly hit by a driveby DDOS. If my service were popular to have a high sustained load, that would be great, but it's more just having some decent capacity to avoid spikes that $20/mo/team member just seems like a decent deal.

The bigger plus is the temp environments, that free up a lot of developer time in my experience; they solve a lot of boring, time-heavy communication problems. A pull request can just spin up a temp environment which a designer can eyeball at the same time as the code is being reviewed. Means less rework.