First deployment classified as Production despite explicit Preview target (Hobby)

[amyegan]

It’s expected that the first deployment is automatically production. But you can use --skip-domain to create a staged production deployment hidden from public access with deployment protection.

Vercel CLI ignores --target=preview and creates Production deployment

You can use vercel --prod --skip-domain to create a staged production deployment as a placeholder. No one, aside from yourself, will be able to access it if you still have the default Deployment Protection setting enabled. But your idea to create two deployments before deleting the initial production version should also work just as well. I hope that helps!