Cloud & Deployment3 min read
AWS vs Vercel: where should you actually deploy a Next.js app?
Vercel sells you time. AWS sells you control. The right answer depends on which of the two your team is short of.
Choose hosting on six criteria: proximity to your users, the workloads you actually run, the pricing model's behaviour at your growth curve, support quality when something breaks, compliance and data residency, and the cost of leaving. Feature checklists matter far less than these.
| Criterion | Question to ask |
|---|---|
| Regions | Is there a region near the majority of users and near the database? |
| Workload fit | Does it run long processes, WebSockets, cron, background workers? |
| Pricing model | Which dimension grows fastest — bandwidth, compute, requests, storage? |
| Support | What is the response time on the plan you will actually buy? |
| Compliance | Data residency, certifications, DPA availability |
| Exit cost | Egress charges, proprietary services, migration effort |
| Ecosystem | Managed database, object storage, queues in the same network |
Because every database round trip pays the latency between your application and your data, and that number is fixed by physics.
An application in Mumbai talking to a database in Virginia adds roughly 200ms per round trip. A page doing six sequential queries is 1.2 seconds of pure network time before any work happens. Co-locating application and database in the same region is the single largest latency decision most teams make, and it is often made accidentally.
There are real benefits — one bill, one network, low internal latency, one IAM model. Split only when a specific service elsewhere is clearly better for a specific need.
Essential for any site with a geographically spread audience. Most providers include one; if yours does not, add Cloudflare or a similar service in front.
All major providers have Indian regions (Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi). For an India-focused audience, hosting in-country cuts latency substantially and simplifies any data residency requirements.
Harshal Patel
Founder & Lead Engineer, ROVQIX
Harshal leads engineering at ROVQIX, where he has shipped production Next.js, Node.js and PostgreSQL systems for startups, SaaS teams and ecommerce brands. He writes about the trade-offs behind architecture decisions rather than the framework of the week.
ROVQIXdesigns and builds production web platforms — Next.js front ends, Node.js APIs and the infrastructure behind them. Tell us what you're building and we'll scope it with you.
Vercel sells you time. AWS sells you control. The right answer depends on which of the two your team is short of.
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