Vercel Hosting

Hosting on Vercel

Note if you have any dyanmic pages (eg. are using php) then you will need to use an alternative for hosting.

Information on Vercel may be found here. The pricing for Vercel is quite generous:

  • Hobby use is free forever
  • Pro accounts are $20/month per team member
  • Enterprise accounts can be made suited to your needs

    • We find the best way to host a website on Vercel is to upload/push your website to a respository on BitBucket, GitHub or GitLab, then whenever you push website changes to the repository they are automatically deployed by Vercel.

    By far the easiest way to host a website on BitBucket, GitHub or GitLab is to import or fork an existing site repository from BitBucket, GitHub, GitLab or any other code sharing platform. See here for a variety of templates you can use to make websites.

    Once you have a website on BitBucket, GitHub or GitLab you can host it on Vercel by following these steps:

    1. Singup for Vercel and login using either BitBucket, GitHub, GitLab;
    2. Click on Import Project;
    3. Choose From Git Repository and select the tab for the provider you want to use;
    4. Follow the instructions about linking Vercel with BitBucket, GitHub and/or GitLab;
    5. Select the repository containing your website;
    6. Pick a name for your project (using the same name as the repository is a good choice);
    7. Enter the directory containing the website (typically ./ if you forked/imported a template from BitBucket or GitHub and site/ if you forked/imported a template from GitLab);
    8. Leave the build and development commands blank (note, you are then expected to build your website before pushing changes through git, though you can put the Ubuntu Nift binary from GitHub releases in your repository and build on Vercel's servers with that) and enter the directory containing the website (again typically ./ if you forked/imported a template from BitBucket or GitHub and site/ if you forked/imported a template from GitLab);
    9. Click deploy site.

    If you go in to View Domains you can add a custom domain, Vercel will sort out auto renewing Let's encrypt certificates for you which is really handy!