Recently, the website of a newly launched restaurant crashed due to a huge number of people trying to book a slot.

Most would think, “Oh, the traffic was too high.”

But the problem is not the volume of traffic. It’s how the website—particularly the server—handles the simultaneous onslaught of booking requests.

From what I heard, the website runs on an edge server using Vercel. This made me question why one would run on an edge setup when handling bookings with heavy traffic.

To me, this kind of workload calls for a proper backend server, a strong database, and careful NGINX configuration.