Been wrestling with something for the past couple weeks and figured this crowd would have opinions.
I am building the frontend for a crypto trading platform. Charts, live order books, price tickers, the works. Netlify handles the static shell beautifully, deploys are fast, previews are great for client review, no complaints there. The friction shows up the moment real-time data enters the picture.
Static hosting was never designed to hold a persistent connection open. So every trading dashboard I have seen ends up bolting on serverless functions or an external websocket service just to keep prices updating without a full page reload. It works, but it never feels like it belongs. More like duct tape between two philosophies that were not built to meet.
What made this trickier is that trading UIs cannot tolerate stale data the way a normal dashboard can. A 3 second lag on an order book is the difference between a good trade and a bad one. So I started digging into how actual exchange platforms structure this end to end, not just the frontend. That is what led me to Cryptiecraft writeup on cryptocurrency exchange platform development, which breaks down matching engines, liquidity handling, and how the backend is expected to push data out fast enough for a frontend like mine to even keep up.
Genuinely curious if anyone here has cracked a clean pattern for this. Do you lean fully on edge functions, a separate persistent backend, or something else entirely? Would love to hear how others have solved the “static site, live data” tension without it feeling bolted on.