SEO? YOUR APP IS BEHIND A LOGIN
Crawlers never see it. You added a server for zero SEO benefit. Congratulations.
7 REASONS SSR IS A LIE
HYDRATION KILLS YOUR PERF GAINS
The page looks loaded. Nothing works. Users click into the void. The browser re-executes all that JS anyway.
SLOW SERVER = WORSE TTFB THAN A SPA
That cold Lambda is slower than a CDN-cached HTML file. You traded guaranteed fast for maybe fast.
YOU'RE PAYING PER REQUEST. AT SCALE.
A SPA on a CDN costs pennies regardless of traffic. SSR scales your bill linearly with your users.
RSC IS COMPLEXITY WITH BRANDING
"use client" everywhere. Two component models. Library incompatibilities. You signed up for a mental model tax.
IT'S MONEY-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
Nobody asked if SSR fits your product. They saw an "article" about it. Guess who paid the author to write it? Vercel did.
YOUR USERS CAN RUN GAMES. THEIR BROWSER IS IDLE.
AVERAGE SMARTPHONE
~15 GFLOPS
enough to run GTA: San Andreas natively
AVERAGE LAPTOP
~3 TFLOPS
more GPU power than a PS4
WHAT SSR OFFLOADS
HTML STRINGS
concatenating divs. on a server. you pay for this.
WHAT THE BROWSER DOES INSTEAD
SITS THERE
waiting for your server to finish its string work
The device in your user's pocket has a multi-core CPU, a GPU with hardware ray tracing, and gigabytes of RAM. It streams 4K video, runs machine learning models locally, and renders 3D games at 120fps. And you're paying a server to concatenate HTML strings for it. The client is not the bottleneck. It never was.
THE RECEIPTS
Documented, real-world billing incidents from serverless platforms. A static CDN-hosted SPA would have cost every single one of these people $0.
$96K
VERCEL FUNCTIONS - ONE MONTH
A single month of Vercel function usage. Ninety-six thousand dollars. Discussed on Hacker News.
$46K
JMAIL - 450M PAGEVIEWS ON VERCEL
Bill exploded to $46k even after tons of cache mitigation. Had to crowdfund the bill.
$23K
ECHOFOX - SPAMMED INTO A $23K BILL
Someone spammed the app. Vercel billed for every single request. 56k+ accounts compromised.
$104K
NETLIFY - TRAFFIC SPIKE ON A FREE TIER
~200 daily visitors. One traffic spike. "I thought it was a joke." It wasn't.
FINE
PRINT
VERCEL DOCS - THE FINE PRINT
"Usage will be incurred for requests not recognized as a DDoS event" - including bots and crawlers. You pay regardless.
160GB
NEXT.JS GITHUB - DDOS IN 2 HOURS
160GB attack in 2 hours on the hobby plan. No spending cap. No kill switch. The meter just kept running.
And if your use case is a landing page - which is the most common justification for SSR - Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages are free. Completely free. Unlimited bandwidth on Cloudflare. No invocations. No memory billing. No cold starts. No Vercel account needed. A landing page is static HTML. It has always been static HTML.
WELCOME BACK, PHP
Want SSR? Have you tried PHP? It's been doing this since 2003. At least it was honest about it.- EVERY FRONTEND DEVELOPER, GOING IN CIRCLES
The industry spent a decade escaping server-rendered templates. Now it's back, with a $20/month npm package and a Vercel invoice. But here's the painful part - PHP actually did it better.
NO BUILD STEP
You edited a .php file and refreshed. That was the deploy.
No webpack. No turbopack. No whatever the build tool you are using. No 47-second cold build. No "wait for the edge function to propagate."
You saved the file. It was live.
$5/MONTH. FOREVER.
A shared hosting plan on literally ANY VPS out there. Five dollars a month. Handled thousands of requests. Nobody got a $96,000 bill because someone refreshed their page too fast. The server was always warm - it was just sitting there.
THE MENTAL MODEL WAS HONEST
PHP never pretended to be something else.
It was a template language. Server gets request, fills in variables, sends HTML.
No "hydration boundaries." No "use client". No wondering which environment
your component is running in. It ran on the server. That was the deal.
OPCACHE BEAT YOUR LAMBDA
PHP 7+ with OPcache serves rendered HTML in under 10ms on a $5 VPS. Your Next.js serverless function cold-starts in 400ms, then takes another 200ms to render. The 2003 technology is faster than the 2024 technology. Let that sit with you.
NO JAVASCRIPT REQUIRED
PHP pages worked with JavaScript disabled. Completely. Forms submitted. Pages loaded. Data appeared. SSR with React requires JS for hydration - disable it and you get a broken, non-interactive shell that looks loaded but isn't.
IT STILL RUNS 77% OF THE WEB
WordPress, Laravel, Wikipedia, Facebook (yes, still). PHP didn't die - it just stopped being cool to talk about. Meanwhile Next.js developers are reinventing server-side templating and calling it innovation.
The difference is: PHP was a pragmatic tool that happened to render on the server. SSR in 2024 is an ideological choice dressed up as a performance story, sold to you by a company that you pay to run your own code. Per invocation.
SPA VS SSR
SSR / NEXT.JS
- Server required - costs money at scale
- Cold starts slow your TTFB
- Hydration: looks ready, isn't ready
- Two component models to understand
- Library compatibility lottery
- DDoS = your bill, not just your uptime
- Paying to concatenate HTML on a server
- Vercel has a $20B reason to push this
SPA / VITE
- Static files on a CDN - scales free
- Deploy to Cloudflare Pages in minutes
- One rendering model, no surprises
- Every package just works
- Client does the work - it has a GPU
- DDoS hits the CDN, not your wallet
- Fast enough for 99.999% of use cases
- No framework with a conflict of interest
DO YOU ACTUALLY NEED SSR?
Do anonymous users land on specific URLs from search engines? If it's behind a login - it doesn't matter what you answer here.
NO → STOPDoes each URL need unique metadata for SEO or social sharing? Generic og:title on every page doesn't count.
NO → STOPIs the content different per URL - not just per user? Personalised dashboards don't benefit from SSR.
NO → STOP
✓ You answered NO to at least one question. Build the SPA. Deploy to Cloudflare Pages. Ship it today.
You answered YES to all three. SSR might be justified. You are in the minority. Proceed with caution.