For two years I ran every environment of every project on Vercel. In May 2025 I moved staging environments off Vercel onto DigitalOcean droplets. Production stays on Vercel. The mix is the right shape.

Why I left staging Staging environments tear up and down constantly. On Vercel, every preview deployment is a function invocation cost, a build minute cost, and (occasionally) a cold-start latency that makes integration tests flaky. On a single £4 droplet running Caddy + Docker, my entire staging is one process, no per-deployment cost, no cold start.

The setup A single CCX13 droplet (€13/month for 2 vCPU + 8GB) running: - Caddy for HTTPS (auto-renewing) - Docker Compose with Postgres, Redis, my Next.js apps - Coolify (open-source PaaS) for git-based auto-deploys - Restic backup to Backblaze B2 once an hour

What it gets me Unlimited preview environments, no Vercel function quotas, identical production-shape Postgres for testing migrations, faster integration tests because everything is on the same Docker network.

What I gave up Vercel's slick branch-preview URLs. Their build optimisations. The "deploy on push" reflex. None of it mattered for staging.

Production stays on Vercel For production, Vercel's edge network is genuinely faster, the analytics are good, the CDN handles bursty traffic without me thinking. £20/month per project is fair for that.

Trying DigitalOcean If you want to test this setup, [they hand out £200 credit for 60 days through this link](https://m.do.co/c/3389d86ebe0c). That is enough to run staging for a year on a small droplet.

I moved my staging from Vercel to DigitalOcean. Here is why

The setup A single CCX13 droplet (€13/month for 2 vCPU + 8GB) running: - Caddy for HTTPS (auto-renewing) - Docker Compose with Postgres, Redis, my Next.js apps - Coolify (open-source PaaS) for git-based auto-deploys - Restic backup to Backblaze B2 once an hour

What it gets me Unlimited preview environments, no Vercel function quotas, identical production-shape Postgres for testing migrations, faster integration tests because everything is on the same Docker network.

What I gave up Vercel's slick branch-preview URLs. Their build optimisations. The "deploy on push" reflex. None of it mattered for staging.

Production stays on Vercel For production, Vercel's edge network is genuinely faster, the analytics are good, the CDN handles bursty traffic without me thinking. £20/month per project is fair for that.

Trying DigitalOcean If you want to test this setup, [they hand out £200 credit for 60 days through this link](https://m.do.co/c/3389d86ebe0c). That is enough to run staging for a year on a small droplet.

Have a project in mind?