HOSTING / LESSON 10
What is Vercel?
Introduction to Vercel platform
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HOSTING / LESSON 10
Introduction to Vercel platform
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You built something people can see in a browser. Cool... now how does anybody else actually see it? Vercel is a platform that makes putting your website on the internet SUPER easy, so the whole world can pull it up.
Vercel was created by the same team that made Next.js, which is one of the most popular tools out there for building websites. That's why the two get along so well. It's kinda like buying a phone from the same company that made the operating system.
Vercel is laser focused on getting your website online fast. Here's what it does really well.
Push your code to GitHub and Vercel puts it online for you, automatically. You don't set up servers or wrestle with complicated configuration. It just works (which is a phrase I don't throw around lightly).
Vercel puts copies of your website on servers all over the world. Somebody visiting from Japan gets your site from a server in Japan. Somebody in Germany gets it from a server in Germany. The result is a site that's fast for everybody, wherever they are.
Every time you make changes, Vercel hands you a special link to preview them. Send that link to a teammate and get their feedback BEFORE anything goes live.
You might be thinking "wait, didn't we just learn about Railway? Why do I need this one too?"
Fair question. They do different jobs.
Vercel shines at hosting the stuff users actually see, like websites, web apps and the visual parts of your project. Think of it as your display window.
Railway shines at hosting what happens behind the scenes, like databases, APIs and background jobs. Think of it as your back office.
Plenty of projects use both! Vercel hosts the website your users visit, and Railway hosts the database and server logic that website talks to.
Here's a simple comparison.
| Feature | Vercel | Railway |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Websites, web apps | Databases, APIs, servers |
| Main focus | Frontend | Backend |
| Deploys from | GitHub | GitHub |
| Free option | Hobby plan (personal projects) | Free trial, then a small free plan |
Vercel works great for a whole bunch of stuff.
And you don't have to tell it which one you've got. Vercel figures out what kind of project it's looking at and sets everything up for you.
Some pretty big names show up on Vercel's own customer page.
If Vercel can handle THEIR traffic, it can handle your lil project too.
Here's why we picked it.
Now that you know what Vercel is, let's go make an account and poke around the dashboard...