Some context here.
I was actually a PM at Google & AWS, not an engineer. Even though I have a CS degree, I had not been professionally coding for almost 20 years. This is my comeback to software development and I've got a lot to catch up on. Hope this sets the stage appropriately.
I mentioned in an earlier comment that we didn't actually build the site and it was on a back-burner until we added episode pages and got hit by costs. It's a lesson learned indeed and we're now treating the website as a first-class citizen in our stack.
We sure do, though we were initially confused by the wording. We thought "stop deployment" meant that we wouldn't be able to deploy. So, we had it turned off initially.
@leerob helped us figure it out on the Vercel subreddit, then we turned it on.
I've addressed this topic in another comment above and will copy it here.
I'd encourage you to read up on how the podcast ecosystem works.
Podcasts are distributed via RSS feeds hosted all over the internet, but mostly on specialized hosting providers like Transistor, Megaphone, Omny Studio, etc. that are designed to handle huge amounts of traffic.
All podcast apps (literally, all of them) like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, Overcast, Pocket Casts, etc. constantly crawl and download RSS feeds, artwork images and mp3s from podcast hosts.
This is how podcasts are distributed since they were introduced by Apple in early 2000s. This is why podcasting still remains an open, decentralized ecosystem.
I can assure you it is not an ad for Vercel.
We're going to put Cloudflare in front of our Vercel site and control cache for SSR pages with Cache-Control headers.
If you want to have a cross-platform experience (mobile + web), you'd have to have a server component.
We do transcript, chapter and summary extraction on the server (they are reused across customers), RSS fetching is optimized (so we don't hit the hosts from all the clients independently), our playlists are server-side (so they can be shared across platforms). As we build out the app, features like push notifications will require a server component too.
I agree with you that a podcast app can be built entirely client-side, but that will be limiting for more advanced and/or expensive use cases (like using LLMs).
The site was originally secondary to our business and was built by a contractor. It was secondary to our business and we didn't pay much attention until we actually added the episode pages and the bots discovered them.
I saw a lot of disparaging comments here. It's definitely our fault for not understanding the implications of what the code was doing. We didn't mention the contractor in the post, because we didn't want to throw them under the bus. The accountability is all ours.
1) Our biggest issue right now is unidentified crawlers with user agents resembling regular users. We get hundreds of thousands of requests from those daily and I'm not sure how to block them on Vercel.
I'd love them to be challenged. If a bot doesn't identify itself, we don't want to let it in.
2) While we fixed the Image Optimization part and optimized caching, we're now struggling with ISR Write costs. We deploy often and the ISR cache is reset on each deploy.
We are about to put Cloudflare in front of the site, so that we can set Cache-Control headers and cache SSR pages (rather than using ISR) independently.
I'd encourage you to read up on how the podcast ecosystem works.
Podcasts are distributed via RSS feeds hosted all over the internet, but mostly on specialized hosting providers like Transistor, Megaphone, Omny Studio, etc. that are designed to handle huge amounts of traffic.
All podcast apps (literally, all of them) like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, Overcast, Pocket Casts, etc. constantly crawl and download RSS feeds, artwork images and mp3s from podcast hosts.
This is how podcasts are distributed since they were introduced by Apple in early 2000s. This is why podcasting still remains an open, decentralized ecosystem.
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