Netlify vs Vultr VPS hosting speed from Australia

2020-04-28

I've been comparing some load speeds from a variety of different web hosting companies. I started out by trying out the free tier of Netlify to compare how the performance is compared with my usual Vultr VPS service.

After seeing that the Netlify load times was almost 10x longer than from the VPS from Australia, I decided to investigate further with some testing. I do like the CI and automatic deployment of web apps with Netlify, something that is much harder to do on a self managed VPS.

The example site used here is my diff-text web app, hosted at the following hosting companies:

Netlify free plan
Vultr VPS (Sydney server)
Surge free plan

Total size of web site is 968 kB (265 kB gziped) across 7 requests.

Speeds were calculated using Uptrends Free Website Speed Test.

Results are shown below. Generally, performance from Netlify with Australian visitors is very poor. Australian targeted sites should stick with a more local VPS, however performance from Netlify is quite reasonable for US visitors.