Choose your stack: VPS vs Cloudflare serverless
Two setups to ship in 2026. Stack A = a VPS you own. Stack B = Cloudflare serverless. Pick A to understand and own everything; pick B to never think about a server.
The big decision
The vibe coder’s first real decision is not “which framework” - it is where does this run. Everything else flows from that. Here are the two setups we recommend in 2026, both opinionated, both cheap, both proven.
Stack A - the sovereign VPS
One small virtual machine (OVH or Hetzner, about 5 EUR/mo) does everything: it runs your Node app, hosts your SQLite database, terminates TLS via nginx, and is where you install Claude Code so the agent works on the box that actually serves traffic.
You develop direct-to-prod: there is no CI pipeline, no staging environment, no Kubernetes. You code on the box, you run npm run deploy:vps, systemd restarts the service, it is live. Rollback is git checkout <prev> && npm run deploy:vps.
You can drive this box from anywhere - an old laptop, a Chromebook, a phone - over SSH into a persistent tmux session. Your “IDE” is a terminal on the server.
Why it wins: fixed tiny cost, full control, one machine to understand, no vendor lock-in, and you don’t need a powerful local machine (the VPS does the work).
Stack B - Cloudflare serverless
Cloudflare Pages (static/SSR frontend) + Workers (API) + D1 (SQLite at the edge) + wrangler CLI. You write code locally, wrangler deploy ships it globally in seconds. No server to patch, no SSH, no nginx.
Why it wins: zero administration, a generous free tier, automatic global scaling, and deploys that take one command.
The trade-off: less control, debugging is more abstract (logs live in a dashboard), and you are locked into Cloudflare’s runtime and limits.
Cost & effort comparison
| Stack A (VPS) | Stack B (Cloudflare) | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | ~5 EUR (VPS) + ~10 EUR (domain) | 0 EUR on free tier |
| Admin work | patch, secure, back up | none |
| Debugging | SSH + journalctl | dashboard + wrangler tail |
| Deploy | git + systemd on the box | wrangler deploy |
| Lock-in | none | Cloudflare runtime + D1 |
| Best for | understanding & owning | not thinking about servers |
Verdict
Pick Stack A if you want to understand what you are doing and own the whole thing for a fixed, tiny price. Pick Stack B if you never want to think about a server and are fine on Cloudflare’s rail.
The rest of this section is Stack A, because that is the path this site took - and because no one else documents the whole chain end to end.
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