Stellar ForgeEvery new project starts with the same question: where does this actually run? The honest answer is that AWS, Vercel, Cloudflare and Render solve different problems, and picking the wrong one costs you months later — not up front.
Start with your traffic shape, not the brand name
A marketing site with predictable, low traffic doesn't need the same infrastructure as an order management system processing millions of requests a month. We ask three questions before touching any config: how spiky is the traffic, how much state does the app hold, and who's maintaining this in a year.
When we reach for Vercel or Cloudflare
Frontend-heavy apps, marketing sites, and anything that benefits from edge caching go on Vercel or Cloudflare Pages. Both give you near-instant global delivery without managing a single server, which matters when a client's traffic can be 90% from one country and 10% scattered across a dozen others.
When AWS earns its complexity
AWS is the right call once an app needs fine-grained control — custom queuing, specific compliance requirements, or a database that needs to live close to a specific data pipeline. It's more setup, but it scales in ways a managed platform can't match.
Where Render fits
Render sits in between: full backend services and databases without AWS-level configuration overhead. It's often our default for internal tools and billing platforms that need a persistent server but not a full AWS stack.
The real answer: mixed stacks
In practice, most of our client platforms run on more than one of these at once — a Vercel frontend, an AWS-hosted API, Cloudflare in front for caching and DDoS protection. The goal isn't platform loyalty, it's matching each piece of the system to what it actually needs to do.