While I compare VPS hosting providers every month, I actually don’t my
personal blog (this site) on a VPS anymore. Come to think of it, I don’t even
remember if this particular iteration of my own private slice of the Internet
has ever been on a VPS instance. I’ve definitely run through the gamut of other
hosting options though, in [probably] the right order:
- Managed WordPress
- Tumblr
- GitHub Pages
- GitLab Pages
- Cloudflare Pages (current)
With Jekyll powering my site, using a Pages provider has been easy (no server
to maintain), convenient (I get to use nvim to write and publish with familiar
git workflows), and free (as in beer).
Okay, to get to the point of this post, I did recently move from GitLab Pages to
Cloudflare Pages. While I do like GitLab, I’ve been moving my git repos back
over to GitHub and needed to either move my blog back to GitHub Pages, or
explore the current landscape a bit more.
While I like GitLab, I love Cloudflare, so exploring their Pages was a must.
Not without issues (weirdness with the Algolia Jekyll plugin that I didn’t
experience with GitLab Pages), the overall experience was in line with what I
had come to expect from git-based status site hosting.
So much so that I didn’t think there was much use in delving into a full-on
comparison of the services. What really stuck out though, was the response times
between GitLab Pages and Cloudflare pages, which was immediately evident in the
reported response times in my UptimeRobot account.
There was a sudden dip in response time the moment I moved over to Cloudflare
pages, I suspect related to them deploying to edge servers which would be closer
to the UptimeRobot servers, and thus, a faster experience.
So how much faster? Here’s the average response times reported by UptimeRobot
for my last 30 days on GitLab Pages and my first 30 days on Cloudflare Pages:
GitLab Pages
Response Time (342.90ms av.)
Cloudflare Pages
Response Time (175.09ms av.)
Granted, we’re only talking a few hundred milliseconds, but CloudFlare Pages’
response time was half that of GitLab Pages! Also, an anecdotal observation is
that CloudFlare seems to have less peaks and valleys, giving a more consistent
performance.
Still not without fault, I also observed a pretty hefty spike in response time
from Cloudflare Pages recently (went up to a few seconds for a few minutes).
If you liked this post, please hit me up and let me know. If there’s enough
interest I’ll spin up an additional site on GitHub Pages and start reporting the
results more regularly!
