Sanity

Next.js hosting cost comparison (Aug 2026)

A developer-authored cost comparison (published August 21, 2026) that models realistic monthly hosting costs for a mid-traffic Next.js site (~80k pageviews/month, ~4 GB egress, ISR on ~200 routes, ~300k image transforms/month). The article compares managed Next.js runtime hosts (Vercel, Netlify), container hosts (Railway, Render, Fly.io), and self-managed VPS (Hetzner/DigitalOcean), providing price ranges, key cost drivers (image transforms, ISR invocations, seats/staging), and operational trade-offs. It recommends Vercel Pro for early client sites with Sanity CMS, migrating to container hosts once costs exceed ~$200/month, and using Sanity's CDN to avoid image-transform charges.

How to Scope a Next.js Project Before Coding

This guide outlines five essential things to define before starting a Next.js project to avoid budget and timeline overruns: a complete page inventory, an explicit CMS decision, a detailed list of third-party integrations, a performance budget, and a timeline with task-level estimates. The author recommends capturing every URL and render strategy, confirming CMS choice (Sanity is suggested as a default with GROQ noted), naming owners for each integration (analytics, forms, search, auth, video, e‑commerce, consent), and setting Core Web Vitals and bundle size targets. The post also gives per-task time estimates and example total durations for common configurations (e.g., a 12-page marketing site with Sanity, SendGrid, and GA4 typically 4–6 weeks).

What Docker Is and Why It Matters

This developer-written article introduces Docker as an open-source containerization platform that packages applications and all their dependencies into isolated, reproducible containers to solve environment-related failures (the "it works on my machine" problem). It explains the difference between Docker images (read-only templates) and containers (running instances), how images are built with a Dockerfile via the Docker CLI, and the immutability advantage images provide for consistent environments across local development, CI, staging, and production. The piece is presented as the first part of a multi-part series that will explore practical Docker usage in later installments.