Choosing a hosting platform for your website

There are a large number of platforms for hosting your website, and they vary significantly when it comes to feature set, pricing, and ease of use. This post will cover five of the most popular website hosting services — Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, AWS Amplify, and Render. We’ll cover the feature sets, pricing, and give a recommendation on what use cases each service is best for.

There are some features that are common to most or all of the platforms. The first is that all the services have broad support for JAMstack frameworks such as Next.js, Gatsby, and Hugo. The big caveat here is that support for server-side rendering (SSR) varies between platforms.

The next commonality is that all the platforms support a Git-based workflow. Simply connect your GitHub repository to the hosting service and push commits to trigger builds. This makes it extremely simple to deploy, since you don’t have to set up your own CI/CD pipeline and configure deployment credentials.

Finally, all of the services serve your content from an edge network or CDN, so that the website loads as quickly as possible. So, you should expect lower latency from these services compared to say, serving your website from a Node.js web server running in a single AWS region.

Now, let’s jump into the services.

Vercel is likely the most well-known web hosting platform. Part of the reason so many people known about Vercel is because the company makes the popular Next.js framework for React. The Vercel platform has been built to provide best-in-class support for Next.js, so if you are using Next, Vercel will be the lowest-friction option for you.

Even if you are not using Next, Vercel is a strong option because it has excellent support for SSR, supports serverless functions for building out your backend API, and enables advanced features such as preview deployments, A/B testing, and feature flags.

Vercel Pricing

Vercel’s pricing is based on the number of developer seats, at $20/seat. If you only require 1 seat, you can use the free tier, but this won’t be sufficient for the vast majority of professional projects. The general sentiment online when it comes to the pricing of Vercel, as well as similarly-priced seat-based options like Netlify and Render, is that it’s cheap to start out but the cost becomes high as your team and web traffic scale up.

When to use Vercel

• You’re using Next.js and want full support for all features such as SSR and ISR
• You want the platform that’s easiest to get started on
• You require advanced frontend-focused features like experimentation and A/B testing

Netlify can be seen as a direct competitor to Vercel. While Netlify offers the same basic features as Vercel, it’s generally not as feature-rich. Netlify supports all major JS frameworks including Next.js, though the support for SSR is reportedly subpar. Since Netlify are not the makers of Next.js, they’ve had to build their own infrastructure for supporting Next’s features, so don’t expect the Next support to be as seamless as Vercel’s.

For a detailed head-to-head comparison between Vercel and Netlify, we recommend reading this post from Northflank .

Netlify Pricing

Netlify’s pricing is also seat-based at $19/seat, and free if you only require one seat. This is virtually the same as Vercel, so this isn’t a differentiator between the two.

When to use Netlify

• You want a simple platform that’s easy to get started on
• You’re deploying a statically-generated site that doesn’t use SSR
• You’re using a JS framework other than Next

Cloudflare Pages is a relatively new player in the space that is optimized for budget and performance. This makes Cloudflare Pages ideal for static sites. Pages also supports direct upload deployments in addition to Git-based deployments, if you want use your own CI/CD pipeline instead of delegating this to the hosting service.

The main drawback of this platform are that it has [limited support for SSR-based frameworks](http://Has very limited support for SSR. Does not support all Next.js features: https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-guides/nextjs/ssr/get-started/ — Cloudflare Workers are a more powerful alternative for deploying full-stack apps). If you are deploying a full-stack web app with SSR, you should consider using Cloudflare Workers instead.

Cloudflare Pages Pricing

The pricing of Cloudflare Pages is simply phenomenal. There is no cost per seat, and you get unlimited bandwidth. The Pro tier includes 5,000 builds per month, which should be more than enough for most teams. If you want the most cost-effective option, Cloudflare Pages is for you.

When to use Cloudflare Pages

• You’re deploying a static site and want the most cost-effective option
• You don’t need server-side features like SSR

AWS Amplify is Amazon’s offering in the space. Its main selling point is that it integrates well with other AWS services, like Lambda, S3, and DynamoDB. As with most AWS services, it is powerful but has a higher learning curve than simpler options like Vercel and Netlify.

Amplify supports SSR, with full support for Next.js. Interestingly, Amplify can generate a backend for your website via the @aws-amplify/backend library, which is powered by DynamoDB tables.

AWS Amplify Pricing

The pricing for AWS Amplify is based on usage, not developer seats. If you’re using the AWS Free Tier, you can deploy a site on Amplify free for 12 months. Since the pricing is based on usage (e.g. actual bandwidth used), it’s hard to predict exactly how much your site will cost before you know your website’s actual traffic.

When to use AWS Amplify

• You are already building on AWS and want to keep your resources consolidated in one place
• You want to integrate with other AWS services like Lambda functions
• You’re willing to deal with a more complex solution

Among the hosting services we’re covering, Render is the most different from the rest. Render can deploy static websites like the other hosting services, but won’t support SSR or full-stack frameworks like Next.js. Like the other hosting services we’ve covered, Render is built around automatic deployments each time you push a commit to your Git provider.

If you want to deploy a full-stack framework or really any backend, you should use what Render calls web services. Web services have an integrated runtime for Node.js, PHP, Go, and several other languages, if you simply want to deploy your code and nothing else.

The cool thing about Render that sets it apart from every other offering we’ve covered is that you can bring your own Docker container, allowing you to use any language and bring in customized dependencies as needed.

The Render website provides an extremely useful comparison with Vercel , which really helped us understand what Render does and what sets it apart.

Render Pricing

Render’s pricing is seat-based at $19/seat, plus compute costs. If you are hosting a static website, there is no compute cost. For web services, the compute cost is determined by the size of the instance your code runs on. A Standard instance (1 CPU, 2 GB memory) costs $25/mo, and the cost scales up for more powerful servers.

When to use Render

• You want to deploy an app with heavy backend functionality while still benefitting from automatic Git-based deployments
• You’re coding in a language other than Node.js
• You want to make use of long-running CRON jobs

There are many options for hosting your website and the best option will depend on your project’s specific requirements. Some of the key considerations are how much backend functionality you require (e.g. SSR) and whether you want to be billed based on seats or actual usage. Some platforms, like Vercel and Netlify, are more frontend-focused, while others like Render are better for full-stack apps.

Migrating from one platform to another can be costly, so it’s important to make a wise choice at the outset. Hopefully this post has helped you understand the major selling points of each platform, so you can dive deeper into the ones that fit your use case most closely.