Are there any plans for a convex hosting service?
It would be nice to not have to manage a Netlify/Vercel/Other account.
15 Replies
No immediate plans but
one of our engineers has a demo of a Convex Component that includes hosting via http actions
Components should ship in a few weeks
basically it'll be possbile to have basic hosting layered on top of Convex but we don't currently plan to have a first-class CDN-based hosting platform like Netlify/Vercel
gotcha, what about plans for partnerships with hosting platforms? Being able to manage everything for an app from the convex platform would be convenient
When you say partnerships, are you thinking of the sort of white labeling partnerships that Vercel provides? One could conceivably get a single console and invoice from Vercel that includes both
- Vercel KV (Upstash) and
- Vercel Postgres (Neon).
The white label offerings cost more and provide fewer features than directly using Upstash and Neon do. But they do offer a useful abstraction if you're not familiar with those underlying products.
I’m currently using https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/pages/ for a project and find how I only get 1 bill and 1 platform to worry about very convenient. Would be nice to have something similar in convex
Pages | Full-stack platform for frontend developers | Cloudflare
Build dynamic front-end applications and deploy directly onto the global network with Cloudflare Pages
oh interesting. Do you run the front end for a Convex project on Cloudflare Pages?
No I’m currently running everything through Cloudflare products (d1, workers, etc). I just prefer using convexs db over sql
Oh, I see. And what do you use for a React framework, e.g. Next.js, Remix. I'm curious if you're able to run Next.js on Cloudflare Pages
I’m using Next. https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-guides/nextjs/ssr/
I configured my particular setup though to do most things through server actions
Cloudflare Docs
Full-stack (SSR) | Cloudflare Pages docs
Next.js ↗ is an open-source React.js framework for building full-stack applications. This section helps you deploy a full-stack Next.js project to Cloudflare Pages using @cloudflare/next-on-pages ↗.
How does this Next+CloudFlare Pages architecture compare with Next+Vercel?
I believe the main difference is there’s no real “server” for cloudflare. It uses cloudflare workers so anything server side needs to specify that it uses the edge runtime
Haven’t used vercel for anything more than hosting static sites though
Also it’s pretty cheap which is nice and has easy integration with cloudflare data products like d1 (SQLite), kv store, and r2 (s3 essentially)
Nice, I've read that Next+Cloudflare Pages is difficult to setup and understand
Yeah, to your original question, it would be pretty great to have front end hosting in Convex, too. Seems like a big task.
I don't think I've ever heard of or seen an commercial app that is all managed in one platform. And even if there were a moment in time where that would be possible, a best-of-breed vendor would emerge again.
The closest I can think of is Firebase in the mid 2010s. But Firebase hosting now is basically unusable with the common React frameworks like Next
That said, the all-in-one platforms are pretty common for internal apps at enterprises, e.g. Salesforce, Appian, ServiceNow apps
as a lot of the resources online are outdated which makes it hard to setup. After that it’s not bad and everything is in one place which is nice. That being said I’ve spent a decent bit of time trying to get the dx experience as close to convex as possible lol.
The Drizzle orm helps a bit but migrations and schemas with convex are hard to beat
And is this all for a high-stakes app, where little setup mistakes, that for example cause bad caching, cause a real problem?
No just a side project for finding the cheapest beer for my college campus. I’m using tanstack query to handle caching though so Idk I’ll have too many issues anyway
haha what a use case