Vercel development at ZeroPixel
Vercel is the hosting platform built by the team behind Next.js, and it's where ZeroPixel deploys almost everything — client sites, our own products, and zeropixel.io itself. For a business, the appeal isn't the infrastructure; it's what the infrastructure removes. There are no servers to patch, no capacity to guess at, and no deploy day that needs to happen at midnight.
The part clients notice fastest is preview deployments. Every change we make gets its own live URL before it touches your site, so you review the actual thing — on your phone, in your own time — rather than approving a screenshot. When it's right, it goes to production in seconds; if something's wrong an hour later, the previous version comes back with one click.
The part that matters longer is what sits underneath: global edge caching so pages load fast wherever your customers are, functions that scale from nothing to a traffic spike without configuration, and analytics that show real user speed rather than a lab score. We also do the unglamorous half — domains, DNS, environment variables, and keeping the bill proportionate to the traffic.
What we do on Vercel
Deployment is where a good build either stays good or quietly falls apart — these four pieces are what we set up on every project.
Production hosting & domains
Your site live on your domain with SSL, redirects and DNS handled — including migrations from an existing host with no downtime window.
Preview deploys & CI
Every change gets a shareable preview URL and passes type checks and tests before it can reach production. Approve what you can see.
Functions, cron & webhooks
APIs, scheduled jobs and third-party webhooks running as serverless functions — no server to maintain, no idle capacity to pay for.
Caching, speed & cost control
Cache strategy, image optimisation and Core Web Vitals monitoring — plus a bill that reflects your traffic rather than surprising you.
Why hire ZeroPixel for Vercel work
- We deploy here every day
- This isn't a platform we read about. Our own site, our own products and most of our client work run on Vercel — so you get settings tuned by people who watch the dashboards, not defaults copied from a tutorial.
- Caching is where the money is
- Most Vercel bills that look alarming are a caching problem in disguise: pages rendering on every request that should be cached for hours. Getting that right makes sites both faster and cheaper at the same time.
- No lock-in theatre
- Vercel suits most of what we build, and sometimes it doesn't — heavy long-running jobs and some data residency requirements belong elsewhere. We'll say so, and we build in a way that keeps moving possible.
Vercel — common questions
Do I have to host with Vercel if you build my site?
No. It's our default recommendation because it's genuinely the smoothest way to run a Next.js site, but the code we write is yours and it's portable. We deploy to Cloudflare, AWS and traditional Node.js hosting when there's a reason to — existing infrastructure, procurement rules, or data residency. We'll tell you what each option costs to run before you choose.
What does Vercel actually cost?
For a typical UK business site, hosting sits in the low tens of pounds a month, and many small sites stay within the free tier. Costs scale with traffic and with how much work each page does on the server — which is exactly what caching controls. We set a budget alert during the build and tell you honestly if your traffic profile means a different host would be cheaper.
Can you move our existing site to Vercel?
Yes, and it's usually a straightforward job. We deploy the site to a preview URL first so you can check every page while the old host is still live, then switch DNS with the TTL lowered in advance so the cutover takes minutes. Redirects are mapped before the switch, so rankings and existing links survive it.
What happens if a deployment breaks something?
Instant rollback. Every deployment stays available as its own immutable version, so restoring the previous one is a single click rather than a rebuild. In practice we catch most problems before that: preview deployments, type checking and tests run on every change, and the production release only happens once the preview is approved.
Do you handle staging environments and environment variables?
Yes — separate production, preview and development environments with their own database connections, API keys and secrets, so test data never touches your live system. Keys are stored in Vercel rather than in the codebase, and access is set up so your team can rotate them without needing us.
Beyond Vercel
A stack is a set of choices that have to work together — these are the pieces we most often pair with Vercel, and where we do it.
Building with Vercel?
Tell us what you're making — we'll reply within one working day with an honest take and a fixed quote.