Vercel for Next.js Hosting: A Strong Start, But Not Always Scalable

Many companies start with Vercel as the hosting platform for their Next.js applications. Here’s why we often use it ourselves—it offers convenience, automatic optimizations, and a scalable infrastructure. However, as businesses grow, challenges arise in cost management, predictability, and performance.

Scaling Next.js Hosting: DiamondsByMe’s Migration from Vercel to Hetzner

For DiamondsByMe (DBM), the time came to transition from Vercel to a self-hosted solution on Hetzner Cloud. In this blog, we explain why, how we managed the migration, and how Afosto helps scale e-commerce businesses.

Expanding to New Markets with DBM

DiamondsByMe allows customers to design custom jewelry online, including engagement rings, wedding bands, earrings, and bracelets. These handcrafted pieces are delivered worldwide within 14 days.

DBM has been operating internationally for years, with webshops in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, and the UK. Their .com store already reaches a global audience, but their ambition is to expand further and communicate with customers in their native languages.

More Languages, More Pages, More Visitors, More Bots = Higher Costs

Vercel is an excellent platform and the go-to solution for startups using Next.js. With a generous free plan, businesses can launch at minimal cost. However, once traffic scales beyond the free threshold, costs increase rapidly.

As more content is added to the webshop, traffic naturally grows—both from customers and bots. While search engines contribute to organic visibility, automated traffic is increasingly coming from data scrapers and AI training models. The issue? This non-revenue-generating traffic incurs costs on Vercel.

Vercel: Fast, Easy, but Limited

Vercel continues to innovate with features like improved image optimization, additional data centers, faster load times, and an enhanced developer workflow. It’s a powerful platform, especially for developers and rapid growth.

However, when it comes to day-two challenges—such as analyzing traffic, debugging performance issues, or proactively managing rising costs—Vercel falls short. For high-growth businesses, this isn’t enough.

Hetzner Cloud: A More Scalable Alternative

Recently, Afosto migrated its CMS platform to Hetzner Cloud, significantly improving both stability and performance. Given these benefits, Hetzner was the logical choice for solving the Vercel hosting challenge.

Afosto & Hetzner: A Smarter Hosting Solution

By switching to a self-hosted environment, businesses gain full control over hosting costs. Monitoring, tracing, and logging become simpler and more cost-effective.

Afosto offers this hosting solution exclusively to customers whose Next.js environments are developed in collaboration with Afosto.

Key Benefits:

• A stable, optimized environment for e-commerce
• Full SLAs, including monitoring, maintenance, and support
• Scalable pricing based on traffic—no hidden fees
• Faster performance and improved load times
• Hosting cost savings of up to 100%

For ambitious retailers looking to scale, a dedicated hosting solution on Hetzner Cloud is a sustainable alternative to Vercel.

Written by

Peter Bakker

I’m Peter, one of the founders of Afosto. I enjoy writing about new features, technical innovations, and working with my colleagues to ensure a fast and stable platform.

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