Deploying Next.js on a VPS: The 12 Things Nobody Tells You

Moving a Next.js app off Vercel and onto a plain Ubuntu VPS usually starts with a painful realization: either your serverless functions are timing out on background jobs, or your client just handed you a strict "you must host this on our infrastructure" requirement. Deploying the app itself is easy. What trips people up (and what cost me hours of debugging and locking myself out of my own server) is everything around the app. Here are the 12 things that actually break when you leave the serverless ecosystem, in the order you'll hit them. 1. Next.js needs a process manager, not just npm start Running npm start in a terminal dies the moment you disconnect. You need something that keeps the process alive, restarts it on crash, and survives a reboot. PM2 is the simplest option for a single-server Node deploy. npm install -g pm2 // ecosystem.config.js module . exports = { apps : [{ name : " my-app " , script : " node_modules/.bin/next " , args : " start " , cwd : " /var/www/my-app " , instances : 1 , exec_mode : " fork " , autorestart : true , max_memory_restart : " 512M " , env : { NODE_ENV : " production " , PORT : 3000 }, }], }; cd /var/www/my-app && pm2 start ecosystem.config.js pm2 save pm2 startup systemd -u YOUR_USER --hp /home/YOUR_USER That last line is the one people forget - without it, PM2's process list doesn't survive a server reboot. 2. Nginx needs to proxy to the port, not serve the files Next.js is not a static site (unless you've explicitly exported it as one). Nginx's job is to forward requests to the Node process, not serve files from disk: upstream nextjs_upstream { server 127.0.0.1 : 3000 ; keepalive 64 ; } server { listen 80 ; server_name example.com www.example.com ; location / { proxy_pass http://nextjs_upstream ; proxy_set_header Host $host ; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr ; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for ; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme ; # WebSocket support - required for HMR and any realtime f