Where to host: Vercel, a VPS, or plain static

Hosting is the one architecture decision the client keeps paying for after you're gone. Pick something over-engineered and they fund idle infrastructure every month. Pick something too thin and the first traffic spike or feature request forces a migration. The right choice follows from what the site actually does, and most sites do less than their hosting suggests.

Static hosting: for sites that are files

If the whole site renders at build time (no API routes, no server rendering, no image optimisation on demand), the output is a folder of files. Files don't need a platform; they need a CDN. Cloudflare Pages, Netlify's free tier, even an S3 bucket behind a CDN.

# next.config.ts: output: "export"
npm run build   # → ./out, deployable anywhere that serves files

Cost is zero or near it, there's nothing to patch, and nothing to scale because the CDN is the scaling. The limitation is exactly the definition: no server code. A contact form needs an external service, and anything per-request is off the table.

Vercel (and friends): for sites with a server side

The moment a project uses server rendering, API routes, or ISR, a managed platform earns its fee. This site runs on Vercel because the contact form is an API route that relays through Resend, and I'd rather not run a server to send four emails a week.

What you're actually buying is operations: deploys on every push, preview URLs for the client, TLS, scaling and rollbacks, none of which bill by the hour of my time. For most client projects the free or £20-a-month tier covers real traffic comfortably.

The trap is bandwidth and function pricing at scale. A site serving heavy media to lots of visitors can outgrow the platform's economics, which is when the third option enters.

A VPS: for when you own the workload

A £5-a-month VPS running Docker and a reverse proxy can host a dozen small sites, background jobs, a database, and anything long-running that serverless platforms are awkward at. The economics are unbeatable and nothing about the workload is out of bounds.

The cost is that you become the platform team. Security patches, backups, monitoring, deploys: all yours. For my own tooling, that trade is fine. For a client handing the site to whoever maintains it next, a snowflake server is a liability I'd have to document and they'd have to staff.

The decision in one question

Does the site run code on the server, and who operates it long-term?

No server code → static hosting, pay nothing. Server code, operated by no one in particular → managed platform, let it be someone else's pager. Server code, operated by you, at scale or with unusual workloads → VPS.

Most client sites land in the first two. The VPS is for developers hosting their own things, not for handing over. And whichever you choose, keep the build output portable: the cheapest migration is the one your architecture never made hard.