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Firebase vs. Vercel (aka Zeit)
Which is the better hosting solution for Next.js-like apps in 2020?
If you’ve recently tried to set up hosting for your web application, you might have noticed something. Hosting web applications in 2020 is both easier and harder than it was only a couple of years ago.
It’s easier because both the tooling and the hosting solutions have improved significantly. Tools like create-react-app
, Next.js and, Gatsby have matured and there are tools introduced every day that help mitigate any shortcomings they have. Setting up hosting has also become much easier. Vercel (formerly known as Zeit) has gained a lot of support and popularity, while Firebase has continued its growth with the abundance of GCP (Google Cloud Platform) based services. Of course, Heroku, GCP App Engine, various serverless solutions, and others are still sticking around too. On top of that, we now have more services that cater to the needs of front-end developers, like Netlify. We’ve certainly come a long way from setting everything up from scratch on server instances.
However, it’s also harder to find hosting these days because of the number of options available. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, there are easily a dozen options, which each have different benefits and caveats. Each has different ways to incorporate them into…