Vercel

Verdict: Worth your time

What it is: a hosting platform for websites. Connect your code repository and every change deploys itself; your custom domain and security certificate take minutes.

What we ran it on

This site. From empty project to live on our own domain with a valid certificate took under an hour of actual platform work: connect the repository, point the domain, done. Every update since has shipped automatically when we push changes, including while we were mid-redesign.

Do this

Connect your code repository and let push-to-deploy do the work. The whole value is removing the "how do I get this live" step.
Use preview deployments. Every change gets its own private URL to check before it touches the real site.
Put your custom domain on it early. The certificate and redirect handling are automatic and correct.

Skip that

Skip it for heavy backend compute or big databases. It's built for websites and light services, and it's excellent at exactly that.
Skip hand-managed servers for a business website in 2026 unless you have a real reason. This class of platform made that work optional.

Sharp edges

Costs can climb with traffic, so know the pricing tiers before a launch you expect to be big. And its edge caching is aggressive: right after a deploy you can fetch a stale copy and think your change didn't ship. Check twice before you panic.

Disclosure: this site runs on it. We pay for it like anyone else.