NextJS Is Hard To Self Host

The timing of this video is interesting. Lee Robinson (the VP of product at Vercel) just uploaded a great tutorial on how to self-host Next.

I love how this channel doesn't pay lip service to Vercel & the likes but instead focuses on the freedom of technology. I'm not even a professional programmer, but I enjoy this very much.

Love that framing of the capability from owning a deployment platform and being able to use two ways to solve the problems

In other news, Rails is literally optimized to work out of the box for a single developer

15:45 In summary, there's nothing wrong with throwing next.js inside a container. That's how all other apps and frameworks work everywhere. It's just that vercel does some additional CDN optimization out of the box. Which is not a big deal for 99% of use cases.

First two minutes of his response was enlightening. If you choose to solve challenges at the infra level. It's a lock in

I still can't believe we have normalized seeing preloaders again thanks to JS frameworks.

If NextJS is so hard to host, then either the framework is a complete dumpster fire, *or* it's designed for the complexity needed by the 0.0001% of websites. (e.g. pre-render page fragments via CDN !?) So glad I don't have to deal with this.

Finally someone who isn’t a cult member of any particular tech. “Just use what you need” if it’s production absolutely right. I’ve not needed to touch next for anything other than hearing people rave about it, I didn’t like it. I don’t like not being able to know what’s going on. A docker container for a website is like a Wi-Fi connected fridge. SSR will destroy companies.

leerob (Lee Robinson) recently posted a self-hosting nextjs tutorial on his channel. It's a good video for anyone that wants to learn the basics of self-host even if you don't use next.