Building a Vercel for Russia: four rewrites of the build system, and other adventures
· 9 min read
A friend sent me a link to his startup's landing page. The site would not open without a VPN.
I asked where he had deployed it. Vercel, he said. Right, I said. Of course.
Over the last couple of years this has become a pattern. A developer builds a site, deploys to Vercel — because it is convenient and fast — and then discovers that half of their Russian audience gets either a timeout or the browser page suggesting they check their connection. The AWS regions Vercel runs on are unreliable from Russia; it depends on the provider, the region and the phase of the moon.
