Choosing Between Vercel and Cloudflare for Low-Cost Website Hosting

·5 views

A solo developer working on a micro-SaaS product shares lessons on keeping hosting costs minimal while avoiding unexpected cloud bills. The piece compares traditional VPS setups, which demand manual server management, with serverless platforms that handle operations and scale automatically. It argues that early-stage founders should default to serverless to preserve their time for building and validating products. The author also notes that workloads needing persistent processes, heavy computation, or custom binaries are better suited to VPS or container hosts. The article then turns to a comparison of Vercel and Cloudflare Workers, as the author's preferred platform choice.

Read the full story at DEV Community

This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)

Hosted Checkout Breaks Purchase Analytics; Webhooks Restore Attribution

A developer building subscriptions for Belle AI found that a standard GA4 purchase event on the thank-you page recorded almost no sales. Hosted checkout sends users to the payment provider's domain, so they often never return to the site, and revenue appeared in the payment dashboard but not in analytics. To fix this, the developer stored first-touch UTM parameters and referrer data in localStorage, which are preserved across later visits. At checkout, that attribution data and GA4 identifiers were passed into the order metadata, which the payment provider returns in its webhook. The webhook handler then sends a purchase event to GA4 via the Measurement Protocol, reusing the stored client and session IDs so sales are credited to the correct traffic source.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

LLM API list prices steady in mid-October as Chinese models trade at about a fifth of US prices

The TANDIU weekly data note for October 13 to 19, 2026 tracks official list prices for 69 AI models and reports that no vendor changed an official list price that week. Chinese models are priced in RMB, so their dollar equivalents shifted only with the exchange rate. The blended average is about ¥56.48 per million tokens for US models versus ¥10.79 for Chinese models, a gap of roughly 5.2 times. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash drew attention on social media, with its input and output tokens costing about 1/13 and 1/17 of Claude Opus 5.5's at list price. The same period's funding tracker logged over 150 rounds, including Ramp's $1.85B Series G at a $60B valuation.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Why a two-node Proxmox cluster freezes, and how a QDevice vote fixes it

A two-node Proxmox cluster can lock itself up because losing either node leaves the survivor with exactly half the votes, which is not a majority. Without quorum, the cluster filesystem at /etc/pve goes read-only, blocking guest starts, config changes and backups even though the surviving node is healthy. Adding a QDevice, a small external voter that can run on a Raspberry Pi or similar always-on Linux box, provides a third vote so the survivor keeps quorum. The QDevice must run on separate hardware, since placing it on a cluster node would remove two votes if that node fails. Unstable links, such as Wi-Fi with high jitter, can also make a cluster appear broken by causing nodes to repeatedly drop out and rejoin.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Stateless Crypto Store Reads Payments Directly From BNB Chain, Skipping a Backend

A developer has built an e-commerce checkout with no backend or database, relying entirely on public blockchain data. The store checks the merchant's USDT balance on the BNB Smart Chain through a read-only contract call made from the customer's browser. The page captures a baseline balance when an order starts, then polls every 20 seconds and marks the order paid once the balance increase matches the quoted amount within a 0.1% tolerance. Orders expire after 60 minutes, and small random amount suffixes plus manual owner verification are used to handle concurrent buyers. The author presents the design as eliminating dropped-webhook reconciliation problems, at the cost of a manual confirmation delay before goods are shipped.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community