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My Jekyll website is currently powered by a shared web hosting plan from HostGator with unlimited disk space & bandwidth. I have also enabled CloudFlare for the site.

I've heard about Heroku which hosts websites for free and GitHub Pages. I won't exceed 2TB bandwidth/month nor do I need more than 300 MB space so I comply with both GitHub Pages & Heroku's limitations.

Which of the following will serve the website fastest to users (and with the max uptime)?

  • Shared web hosting (I deploy via rsync)
  • GitHub Pages
  • Heroku

I think shared web hosting is slower than Heroku or GitHub Pages. So, what should I use? Is GitHub Pages faster than Heroku with 1x dyno?

My website gets about 15k pageviews/daily.

Elmo
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1 Answers1

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GitHub Pages uses Fastly, a CDN, to deliver its content. Unless you're using a similarly fast and efficient caching system, you'll see that GitHub Pages is fastest.

Jeremy Morgan wrote a great piece some time ago wherein he compared GitHub Pages to several other services. He found that GHP is the fastest of the four services he tested and recommends GHP. He doesn't have any data on Heroku, but setting up your site to work with Heroku shouldn't take that long. You can compare speed with webpagetest.org, as Jeremy suggests.

If your 15K pageviews see a lot of overlap (i.e. mostly the same collection of pages/assets being loaded), then you'll find that Fastly on GHP offers you better page load times than other services.

parkr
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  • Hey, you are a Jekyll developer! Thanks for the awesome work. I have migrated about 10 sites from WordPress to Jekyll since I found about it few weeks ago. I am also using CloudFlare on my GitHub Pages sites. Should I disable it since its powered by Fastly? The only thing I don't like about Jekyll is that it doesn't minify the CSS, JS & HTML which CloudFlare does for me. – Elmo Aug 04 '14 at 11:55