"Moreover it is faster than other static hosting services. Because it runs on Google infrastructure."
Um, wow.
Um, wow.
I can definitively say that unless Google App Engine has substantially changed in architecture over the last 12 months, it is definitely not faster to host your static site there rather than on an nginx-based VPS with someone like Digital Ocean.
My tests showed load times on GAE-hosted static sites to be around 200ms - 300ms slower than a reasonably-optimised DO VPS.
It's possible, of course, that GAE would pick up some speed if you're loading the page from somewhere a long way away from the equivalent VPS, as GAE essentially comes with a built-in CDN (to the best of my understanding).
And does Cloudflare cache HTML pages? Last I checked it only cached (what it considered) static assets and hit the origin for every page.
Yes. "It was like that when I got here." I'm working on it.
> And does Cloudflare cache HTML pages? Last I checked it only cached (what it considered) static assets and hit the origin for every page.
Yes. This is configurable.
Also, cloudflare does support clearing of individual files. There is an API for it. Pretty sure their web client does too.
I can load his GAE-hosted web site in ~300ms, and there's a useful performance box on the right sidebar of his site that breaks down how long each component takes to load on GAE:
$ time curl http://www.elie.net/ > /dev/null % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 36146 0 36146 0 0 113k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 114k real 0m0.316s user 0m0.005s sys 0m0.005s
I've been thinking of doing the same with my personal web site but haven't yet.
Do you know what language he used to implement the base setup? I had a suspicion that implementing in Go might end up being faster than Python.
When serving static pages, it is unlikely that any sort of engine will outperform something more like a CDN. I hate it when people just throw out the Google name as proof of performance/excellence/etc. Can we be a bit more scientific here?