Hosting & SecurityVercel review
Hosting built for modern sites: push to git, serve from the edge, never touch a server.
Is Vercel right for you?
Vercel is where modern custom sites go to live, and it’s become our favourite place to put them. You connect a git repository, and every push builds and deploys itself, served from a global edge network, with a preview URL for each change so work can be reviewed before it’s live. The site you’re reading ships exactly that way.
What makes it the default for custom builds is how much it removes. There’s no server to provision, patch, or scale; no staging environment to maintain by hand; no deployment ritual beyond merging a branch. For a small team, or one developer, that’s an enormous amount of operational work that never appears. The back end is also unusually legible for infrastructure: you can look at a deployment and understand what happened.
It’s free to start, with paid tiers when you need them, and so far it has done essentially everything we’ve wanted. Alongside a Postgres database and an edge layer in front, it’s the hosting half of the lean stack we build on, which is why we’re deploying to it constantly at the moment.
Two cautions. Pricing is usage-based, so a site that gets popular can move from free to a real bill quickly; understand the meter before you need to. And it’s emphatically not a general-purpose host. If your site is WordPress, this is the wrong tool entirely: managed WordPress hosting exists for exactly that job and does it far better.
Questions about Vercel
What people usually want to know before committing, answered the way we'd answer them on a call.
How does deploying to Vercel actually work?
You connect a GitHub repository, and that's most of it. Every push builds and deploys itself, and each change gets its own preview URL for review before anything goes live. There's no server to provision or patch, no staging environment to maintain by hand, and no deployment ritual beyond merging a branch.
Is the free tier enough to start on?
Comfortably, and plenty of real sites never leave it. Pricing is usage-based, not plan-based, so traffic and build minutes move you onto a paid tier, not a feature you've hit. That's a sensible shape, since it costs nothing until something is working, but a commercial site that takes off can reach a real bill faster than expected. Understand the meter before you need to.
Does it work with the framework I'm using?
Almost certainly, if it's a modern one. Next.js, Astro, plain static HTML, and the rest of the current landscape deploy without much ceremony, and the build tooling is pleasant rather than something to endure.
Can I host a WordPress site on Vercel?
No, and it's worth being blunt, because the categories look similar from outside. Vercel serves modern sites and applications built from a git repository; WordPress is a PHP application with a database that expects a traditional server. If your site is WordPress, managed WordPress hosting will serve you far better, and that's a different entry on this shelf.
Read the Cloudways review
Still deciding?
Not sure if Vercel is the right call?
The tool is rarely the hard part; fitting it to what you've already got is. Five minutes with the concierge: honest fit, no pressure, and a real person follows up.
More Hosting & Security
The rest of this shelf, if you're weighing your options.
WP Engine
Cloudflare
Cloudways
Netlify
Sucuri
SupabaseDisclosure: there's no affiliate link on this page. We don't earn anything if you sign up for Vercel; it's here because it's good. Other tools in the toolkit do carry affiliate links, and each of those pages says so.