Question 1

What's the difference between JAMstack and traditional server-side rendering (SSR)?

Accepted Answer

In JAMstack, pages are usually generated ahead of time during a build (pre-rendered) and served as static files from a CDN. Dynamic features (like comments or search) are handled by calling APIs. In traditional SSR, the server generates the HTML on each request (or frequently), which can add latency and requires scaling the web server layer for traffic spikes.

Question 2

When should I use JAMstack?

Accepted Answer

Use JAMstack when most of your site can be pre-rendered and you want fast global performance, strong security (fewer server endpoints), and simpler scaling. It’s a great fit for marketing sites, documentation, blogs, landing pages, and many e-commerce front ends. If your pages must be highly personalized per request, require complex server-side sessions, or depend on heavy real-time server rendering, you may prefer SSR or a hybrid approach (static + SSR/edge rendering).

Question 3

How much does JAMstack cost?

Accepted Answer

Costs are typically driven by CDN bandwidth/requests, build minutes (CI/CD), storage for static assets, and API/serverless usage for dynamic features. Many JAMstack sites are inexpensive at small-to-medium scale because static hosting and CDNs are cost-efficient, but costs can rise with high traffic (egress), frequent rebuilds, heavy image/video delivery, or chatty API calls. Using caching, image optimization, and minimizing rebuild frequency can significantly reduce spend.

JAMstack

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