May 7, 2026
Both have their place. I run MCP servers in production and Vercel's wrong for that workload - these are long-running HTTP/stdio servers that need state and persistent connections. Railway, Render, Fly.io handle that shape better.
But Vercel's the right call for stateless edge stuff. Next.js apps, serverless functions, anything that benefits from fast cold starts and global edge cache.
After building enterprise platforms for 30+ years, the pattern's clear: match the deploy target to the workload shape. Your frontend might live on Vercel while your queue workers and websocket servers run on Railway. Both right at the same time.