"Where do we put the app?" is the question we get every week. The honest answer is there is no universal winner. There are three families, three philosophies and three price ranges. Let us walk through them with real 2024 numbers.
Vercel: time-to-online
Vercel is the home of Next.js. Deploy is trivial (git push and you are live), global Edge Network, PR previews, Image Optimization, integrated Analytics. For an MVP or a low-traffic brochure site, it is unbeatable in setup time.
Typical cost for a real client (headless e-commerce, 80k page views/month):
- Pro plan: $20/user/month
- Bandwidth and function execution: ~$80-120/month above the included tier
- Realistic total: ~$120-180/month
When we pick it: small/mid projects, mostly Next.js, traffic in line with the plan, small team unwilling to do sysadmin.
Limits: costs spike fast if traffic grows or Server Actions run long. The "surprise bill" happened to us too.
Hetzner: European price/performance
Hetzner offers VPS and dedicated servers in Germany and Finland at unique prices. A CPX21 VPS (3 vCPU AMD, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD, 20 TB traffic) costs ~€9/month. For anyone willing to configure servers, it is Europe's best price/performance.
Our typical stack on Hetzner:
- Ubuntu 24.04 LTS VPS
- Caddy or Nginx as reverse proxy
- PM2 or systemd for Node.js
- Postgres on a dedicated VPS (CCX13 or higher)
- Nightly offsite backup (Hetzner Storage Box or Backblaze)
Typical cost (same e-commerce, 80k pv/month):
- App VPS: €15/month
- Database VPS: €25/month
- Backup storage box: €4/month
- Total: ~€45/month
Plus ~15-20 hours/year of our maintenance. Worth it when traffic is stable, instant-scaling needs are absent, and a predictable bill beats the comfort of zero ops.
AWS: when you really need it
AWS is rich, complex, and — if misconfigured — expensive. Not the default for a brochure site. The right pick when there are specific compliance needs, deep managed-service integrations (RDS, S3, Cognito, EventBridge) or the client already lives in the ecosystem.
For enterprise projects with Italian data residency, certified audit trails, multi-region failover, AWS remains the right call. For the average SME it is an investment that only pays off when the asks justify it.
Our decision matrix
| Case | Pick |
|---|---|
| MVP, brochure site, blog | Vercel |
| Production web app with stable traffic | Hetzner |
| Heavy compliance / multi-region | AWS |
| Client with in-house DevOps | Hetzner or AWS |
| Client who "does not want to think about it" | Vercel |
The most common mistake is not picking the wrong vendor. It is staying with the same vendor after the requirements have changed.