Switched to Vercel

I've made two changes to the blog for this year:

1. I've switched to Next.js
2. This blog used to be hosted on my own server, and now it is on Vercel

Having been familiar with Gatsby, I found Next.js to be really simple. I feel so far that for creating a simple blog, Next.js was intuitive. I do not yet know if it's easier because I'm actually losing functionality.

For hosting, I've switched to Vercel. I started looking into these because this site content is static. Running my own server does take time to upgrade and maintain. Also, I'm aware that running a static site can delete the files while the generation occurs. For some sites, this results in downtime of a couple of minutes for each build. Vercel eliminates that downtime while adding some nice preview features.

I hope I can move other sites over to Vercel, but it will be hard to move from paying $6/month for a small DigitalOcean server to a $20/month Vercel subscription. Netlify is the same. In the future, I'm optimistic that Cloudflare Pages will provide this for less. However, Cloudflare Pages is in Beta, so I cannot use it yet.