Deploying Next.js on Any Server

Private server deployment

So far, we’ve seen some alternatives for deploying our Next.js application to CDNs and managed infrastructures, such as Vercel and Netlify. Still, there is another alternative that we haven’t considered yet: what if we want to deploy our application to our private server?

Even though this is a common situation, it’s also the most complex one by far. While platforms such as Vercel, Netlify, and Heroku manage the server for us, sometimes we may want to host our application on a private server where we have to control everything independently.

Let’s have a quick recap of what the previously mentioned managed platforms can do for us:

• Automatic deployments

• Rollback to previous deployments

• Automatic deployments for feature branches

• Automatic server configuration (Node.js runtime, reverse proxy, and so on)

• Built-in scaling capabilities

By choosing a custom server, we have to implement all these features on our own. But is it worth it? Well, it depends. When working in a large company that already has a significant infrastructure up and running on a given cloud provider (be it Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and so on), it might make sense for us to identify the best solution for deploying our Next.js application in the same infrastructure.

If we’re working on a side project or a small business website or starting a new web application from scratch, we could consider alternatives, such as managed platforms or CDNs, but we’ve already talked about that.