Hosting Your Startup
Start on Vercel or a similar platform. It allows your team to ship code without managing servers. Move to AWS only when your scale or complexity requires it. Optimize for developer speed in the early days of your company.
What is Developer Velocity?
Developer Velocity is The speed at which your engineering team can move from an idea to a live feature.
The 3 Core Benefits
High Speed Ship
Your team can deploy dozens of times every day. This rapid cycle is the key to finding what users actually want.
Lower Stress
Managed hosting handles SSL and scaling automatically. You do not have to wake up in the middle of the night for server crashes.
Strategy Deep Dive
You are not a DevOps engineer. You are a startup founder. Do not waste time configuring load balancers in the beginning.
Vercel provides the best developer experience for modern web apps. Git push to deploy is the standard you should aim for.
Managed platforms give you preview environments for every pull request. This makes testing and collaboration with your team much faster.
AWS is powerful but creates massive cognitive load. Only switch to it when you have a dedicated engineer to manage the complexity.
Start with a simple database provider like Neon or Supabase. Keep your state separate from your compute for easier scaling later on.
The goal is to provide a fast and reliable experience for your users. The best hosting is the one you do not have to think about.
Infrastructure Path
Deploy on Vercel
Connect your GitHub repo and go live in five minutes. Use the hobby or pro plan to get your first users.
Use Managed Data
Pick a serverless database that scales with your traffic. Avoid the headache of manual backups and patches.
Scale as Needed
Monitor your usage monthly. Only move parts of your stack to AWS when the Vercel bills become unreasonably high.
AWS (Early) vs. Vercel (Early)
| Feature | AWS (Early) | Vercel (Early) |
|---|---|---|
| Complexity | High | Low |
| Velocity | Slow | Fast |
Frequently Asked Questions
Vercel too pricey?
Vercel is expensive at high scale. But for most startups the time saved is worth more than the extra server cost.
Can I use both?
Yes. Host your frontend on Vercel and your expensive processing workloads on AWS. It is a common hybrid approach.
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