Thanks for the data. I recently moved https://app.qvault.io from GH pages to Netlify. I liked the simplicity of pages, but Netlify had SSR features that I really needed :P
Benchmarking static website hosting providers
11–20 of 66 posts
Re: Benchmarking static website hosting providers
#12I'd like to see a comparison among Netlify, Vercel, and Render.com as they all offer free hosting for static sites with similar usability.
It's a growing service category (free hosting for static sites deployed from GitHub). Are there others (besides GitHub Pages) I don't know about?
Re: Benchmarking static website hosting providers
#13It is kind of strange comparing AWS Cloudfront (CDN) with normal GCP Buckets (S3 like). It would have been interesting using a GCP loadbalancer in front of the bucket because then you can enable the cdn option, this should be an equal setup to cloudfront.
Re: Benchmarking static website hosting providers
#14A CDN doesn't actually offer you to host websites. Basically it caches your website content, and can help you in improving the performance your visitors. Eventhough Cloudflare is the most widely used free CDN, there are other CDNs you might need to look : https://www.nets4.com/2020/07/free-cdn-providers.html
Re: Benchmarking static website hosting providers
#15I put Cloudflare in front of my portfolio, which is hosted on Github Pages, so this made me do a bit of spit take. I always just assumed that GH Pages was a sort of “free perk for using Github” and that it must surely be hosted on “meh” infrastructure that would benefit from having a CDN in front. This article basically says that analysis is upside down. I’ll need to see more benchmarks with a range of methodologies…
I also looked into removing Cloudflare from my github pages hosted website, but I need IPV6 support, and github pages doesn’t have that (1). Cloudflare proxies those requests to IPV4 so my website is accessible to everyone in the world.
(1) https://github.community/t/cannot-reach-any-github-io-page-v...
Re: Benchmarking static website hosting providers
#16A CDN is not the same as a hosting provider. Proximity to edge locations of the CDNs likely has something to do with latency delays. Also proximity of your hosting server location to Cloudflare's CDN. I ran a similar benchmark for time to first bite with a Heroku site behind CloudFlare and since the Heroku edges location varied wildly, latency varied wildly as well. CloudFront in front of an S3 bucket in the same loc…
Re: DDoS protection:
AWS includes their standard anti-DDoS support for free with most AWS services exposed to public including Cloudfront. https://aws.amazon.com/shield/getting-started/
Re: Benchmarking static website hosting providers
#17Vaguely related: We use AWS S3 to poll for changes in a file from dozens of deployed devices regularly (polling is not the smartest way...). We get failures that the file header cannot be retrieved many times a week. Well, one could guess it's a connectivity problem of the device. Most are on cellular networks, but the problem also occurs from devices connected to one of the top US universities' network. The devices send an alarm right away when it happens via AWS SNS and we receive them, so we are forced to believe that AWS S3 reliability is not that high. If it really were a general connectivity issue we wouldn't get the alarm either; there is (light) retry for the S3 access, but none for the SNS alarm. These are authenticated accesses so more points of failure involved on S3 side. We use several regions relatively local to the devices and it happens in most if not all of them.
Re: Benchmarking static website hosting providers
#18CloudFlare's slowness is extremely surprising to me. From my house in Greece, I get a one millisecond ping to 1.1.1.1 (devices in my house have higher pings), so I was assuming that would carry over to their caches. Too bad about that, looks like I'm going to have to rethink my setup of having them cache my site on their edge.
> ...so I was assuming that would carry over to their caches.
I see mixed results with Cloudflare (pro plan): Sometimes the load times are as low as 50ms, the other times as high as 250ms; both for multiple hours on end, even when I am connecting to the same co-location.
I gave AWS Cloudfront a try as well, and to my surprise their load times held consistently at less than 40ms throughout. It is another thing that, quite unfortunately, for my workloads, Cloudfront turns out to be very expensive.
Re: Benchmarking static website hosting providers
#19The services were probed once every minute for 10 days
If a page is being hit 1440 times a day for more than a week, without any content changes, wouldn't it end up being served from a caching server at the bigger hosts, with very little chance that it'll ever get flushed from the cache? It's valid to test that if that's the experience you want to test, but a website is only getting a few hundred views a week then you could have very different results in the real world.
Re: Benchmarking static website hosting providers
#20I put Cloudflare in front of my portfolio, which is hosted on Github Pages, so this made me do a bit of spit take. I always just assumed that GH Pages was a sort of “free perk for using Github” and that it must surely be hosted on “meh” infrastructure that would benefit from having a CDN in front. This article basically says that analysis is upside down. I’ll need to see more benchmarks with a range of methodologies…
Github Pages uses Fastly (https://www.fastly.com/customers/github) as a CDN, which is pretty comparable to Cloudflare AFAIK.