You could also get a VPS from Digital Ocean or Hertzner, run open-source PaaS like Coolify, Dokploy, Caprover, etc.
Digital Ocean has app platform that’s lets you host these applications but more experience than VPS
Sealos has a $7 and $25 plan and work with Next.js
Just a few options. If you’re looking to leave Next.js completely, check out Tanstack Start. It’s by the creator of React-Query (defacto way to handle fetching data in Next.js). Still some rough edges but I think it could overtake Next.js once a bit more mature.
Isn't he going to ask for a "favor"?
And we are talking about static content. You will be bottlenecked by bandwidth before you are ever bottlenecked by your laptop.
While I've also got enough other stuff running that my 15 min load average is at 4 and I've got 83% RAM used ignoring buffers/caches/otherwise.
I went and grabbed a random benchmarking tool and pointed it at it with 125 concurrent connections.
Sustained an average of 13914 reqs/s. Highest latency was 53.21ms.
If there are 10,000 people online at any given time hitting the API on average once every 3 seconds (which I believe are generous numbers), you'd only be around 3.3k reqs/s, or about 24% of what my laptop could serve even before any sort of caching, CDN, or anything else.
So... if a laptop can't serve that sort of request load, it sounds more like an indictment of the site's software than anything.
Considering the content is essentially static, this is actually viable. Search functions might be a bit problematic, but that's a solvable problem.
Of course you pay with engineering skills and resources.
Or if you go ping pong across containers to handle a single request. That will certainly make a laptop unable to handle this load.
I guess you would need some sort of search term to document id mapping that gets downloaded to the browser but maybe there's something more efficient than trying to figure out what everyone might be searching for in advance?
And how would you do searching for phrases or substrings? I've no idea if that's doable without having a database server-side that has the whole document store to search through.
there might be some piece I'm missing, but the first thing that comes to mind would be using that, possibly with the full-text search extension, to handle searching the metadata.
at that point you'd still be paying S3 egress costs, but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't at least an order of magnitude less expensive than Vercel.
and since it's just static file hosting, it could conceivably be moved to a VPS (or a pair of them) running nginx or Caddy or whatever, if the AWS egress was too pricey.
Some cloud products have distorted an entire generation of developers understanding of how services can scale.
I’d interpret “thousands of people hitting a single endpoint multiple times a day” as something like 10,000 people making ~5 requests per 24 hours. That’s 0.5 requests per second.
Part of why this is a problem is that consumer grade NICs often tend to overload quite a lot of work to the CPU that higher end server specced NICs do themselves, as a laptop isn't really expected to have to keep up with 10K concurrent TCP connections.
and if it doesn't spawn up another $30 instance and add another RR entry to the dns
serving static content scales horizontally perfectly
They will sell you a 10Gbps uplink however, with (very reasonably priced) metered bandwidth.
I've hosted side projects on Hetzner for years and have never experienced anything like that. Do you have any references of projects to which it happened?
They offer unlimited bandwidth with their dedicated servers under a “fair usage” policy.
The bandwidth costs would be higher than what you pay monthly, so they would simply drop you.
You are probably using very little bandwidth, so it doesn’t matter in your case.
However, I assume Jmail consumes a very large amount of bandwidth.
But not because of being "not a profitable customer". Mind sharing some links here?
Have seen it happen to smaller projects and even pointed it out when Vercel took static sites down.
So they have always had a bad rep in my opinion.
roughly 47 percent of a recent US survey think supporting Israel is in the national interest of the United States, while 41 percent disagree. only 12 percent didn't offer an opinion. that's quite a lot of potential customers you're detracting when making a stupid political statement, especially taking a photo with a leader whom 49% of people "have an unfavorable opinion" of
Bangladesh: On 12 April 2025, Dhaka hosted what was described as the largest pro-Palestine protest in history, with an estimated 1,000,000 participants at Suhrawardy Udyan.
Italy: Between 3 and 5 October 2025, an estimated 2.3 to 3 million people participated in nationwide strikes and marches, marking the highest level of European mobilization during the conflict.
Spain: Over 1,000,000 people filled the streets of Madrid, Barcelona, and other cities in early October to support the "Sumud Flotilla" and demand an arms embargo.
Australia: Organisers estimated that over 300,000 to 350,000 people participated in nationwide rallies on 24 August 2025, following diplomatic tensions between the Australian and Israeli governments.
Netherlands: Approximately 250,000 people marched in Amsterdam’s "Red Line" protest in October, the third such major rally in as many months. "
I'm fully aware of my Jewish brothers and sisters who stand shoulder to shoulder with me against the current Israeli actions ... but, fuck Israel ... and all who support their current stance.
Frankly, watching Israel has been the closest we've come to having a petri dish to understand how Nazi'ism developed and rose. I have a better understanding now of how the Hitler Youth developed, and how cultural blindness, manipulation, nationalistic obsessives and ideologues enable a cancer to spread among its politics leading to full blown Nazism. I have a better understanding of all of that from watching the current Israeli state and reading about it's history.
It's a disgusting tale and shouldn't have been funded by US taxpayers.
$50000 vs €30. (or €42066.30 vs €30 if I normalize the currency) 5x10^4 vs 3x10^1.
I don't understand how those are in the same ballpark? I thought saying something is in the same ballpark suggested that they are similar in scale, and the implication is that little-leauge does not play in the same ballpark as a NBA team. They are in the same category (baseball), but not at all the same level.
50k/mo is 600,000/yr vs 360/yr at 30/mo. Thats existential for a 1MM/yr company. Neither register on a balance sheet for a 1B/yr company. They are both closer to 0 than being a major cost.
Even 50k and 30 I would not say are in the same ballpark. I've worked for major corps and of course a cost saving of 50k/month would not register for the overall company but it probably would for my team. A saving of 30/month is probably not worth spending any considerable amount of time on in most non-personal contexts.