Running Next.js yourself when the hosting bill matters

The problem

A coupon aggregator with browsing by store and category, plus social sharing so a deal can travel between friends.

The decision

It runs behind nginx on a virtual server I manage, rather than on a managed platform. That means the deploy, the process supervision, the certificates and the log rotation are all mine to get right, and there is no platform to blame at three in the morning.

It is a reasonable trade when the hosting bill matters more than the convenience, and an unreasonable one when it does not. Knowing which situation you are in is the actual skill.

What I would change

The page is client-rendered, so a crawler or a link preview sees an empty document, and first byte is slower than it should be. Moving the browse pages to server rendering would fix both and is the first thing I would do next.