SFTP Deploy Without Vercel — Boring on Purpose
In today's web development ecosystem, the default recommendation for deploying a modern React single-page application is almost invariably a managed platform like Vercel, Netlify, or AWS Amplify. With seamless GitHub integration and one-click deployments, these services offer undeniable convenience. However, convenience frequently comes at the cost of opacity, vendor lock-in, and unpredictable subscription pricing models.
For my portfolio, I made an intentional architectural choice: deploying pre-built static assets to an independent IONOS web server via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). This "boring on purpose" deployment model provides total ownership of our web infrastructure, guaranteed fixed costs, and an educational case study in foundational web operations.
Platform-as-a-Service providers make it deceptively easy to deploy, but they tightly couple your deployment pipeline to their proprietary serverless backends, edge middleware, and billing tiers. A sudden surge in web crawler traffic or an automated security scan can trigger surprise bandwidth bills or account throttling.