In this article, we are going to see the reasons that made us change our backend to Fly.io and the challenges we had during the migrations.
We chose Hono as our API server with Bun as the runtime and picked Fly.io as our hosting service.
🤔 Why did we want to move our backend from Vercel?
⚡ A lightweight Server
We required a lightweight server with a simple REST API for our monitoring endpoint. Deploying a simple Express server is possible, but it is not specifically designed for this purpose.
It's possible to deploy an Express.js application as a single Serverless Function, but it comes with drawbacks and should only be used as a migration path. Instead, use Next.js or embrace multiple Serverless Functions as you incrementally migrate to the Vercel platform.
Also launching a clean and new Next.js server takes 2.5 seconds on my MacBook Pro M1 and takes 110mb of RAM, and it includes unnecessary extra features from Next.js. Our prod Next.js app takes about 5 seconds to launch on my computer (contentlayer).
For comparaison launching our current server takes 0.19ms and only takes 91mb. Our current server stack is Hono + Bun.
💸 Pricing
We initially aimed to provide multi-region monitoring for all users while maintaining a free tier. On Vercel, if you want a multi-region function, you need to opt for Edge Functions. Edge functions are cost-effective as you only pay for the actual CPU execution. This means that you won't be billed for idle times when fetching data.
It's still affordable, but we are a bootstrap business and it difficult for us to predict our monthly expenses. If we experience an increase in new users, our costs will also increase accordingly.
Here's the math for the cost of one monitor for a user:
6 (10 min monitors) * 24 * 30 * 3 (average execution unit per monitor) * 6 (number of regions) = 77,760 executions units per month
77,600 * (2/1,000,000) = 0.15c per monitor monthly
We have over 1000 monitors, and the monthly cost to run them would be $150.
While on fly we only have 6 servers with 2vcpu/512Mb It cost us $23.34 monthly ($3.89*6).
🤯 What challenges did we face during our migrations?
Docker + monorepo = 🪨
We are deploying to fly.io. We have to setup our app as a Docker image. Our apps is in a monorepo. Our initial image was over 2 GB in size, which was excessively large for a basic server.
Our image included everything, which was inefficient. After optimizing, our image now occupies only 700MB. Although it is still somewhat large, it is a significant improvement over our initial version.
It was something we never had to manage with Vercel deployment.
⏳ Fly deployment timed
Our Fly deployments have been experiencing frequent timeouts without any specific reason. The only solution we have discovered is to increase the timeout duration.
flyctl deploy --wait-timeout=500
Based on our experience, Fly deployments are generally less reliable compared (more timed out) to Vercel deployments. Additionally, we have not discovered a quick method to rollback to the previous version.
🐛 The Bun bug
When we migrated to Fly, we decided to use Bun as our runtime. However, in the first few hours after the migration, we observed an unexplained increase in request failures.
After digging into the Bun GitHub we found a solution: We needed to set the
keepalive parameter to false. This is necessary because closed connections
are not automatically removed and remain in the CLOSE_WAIT state.
Here's the GitHub issue:
https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/3327
I wish it had been documented elsewhere.
Our conclusion
We are pleased with our migration to Fly.io, although it was accompanied by a challenging weekend. And we still love Vercel, they offer a super product, it removes a lot of pain for the developers. However, if you require a hosting an application other than Next.js, it may not be the best option.
We are still using it for our frontend.
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