We chose Next.js static export (output: 'export') for botnetit.com—fast hosting, no server costs, great performance. It works well, but it's not a drop-in replacement for a full Next.js server.

What Works Great

• Blazing fast page loads from any CDN or static host
• Built-in metadata API for SEO
• generateStaticParams for blog posts and dynamic routes
• Simple deployment—upload the out/ folder

What We Had to Work Around

No API routes: Contact forms post to external services. We use client-side submission to a backend API instead of Next.js route handlers.

No server-side revalidation: Blog posts and sitemap are generated at build time. We added scripts to regenerate RSS and sitemap before each deploy.

Image optimization: We set images.unoptimized: true since the default optimizer requires a server.

Our Deploy Checklist

1. Run npm run gen:assets for favicons and RSS
2. Run npm run build
3. Upload out/ to hosting
4. Verify sitemap, robots.txt, and llms.txt are accessible