Using the same tool, I can see that my website loads in 440ms in the Netherlands. The homepage is 140kb, makes 6 requests, leverages caching and http/2 thanks to nginx etc.
Which is great and everything, but for a reader in Texas, that becomes 1.2s thanks to the fact that my site is hosted in London.
As you point out, AMP pages which weigh in at 4MB can be loaded in a seemingly underwhelming time: ~800ms. However, I think the important takeaway from this is that the pages load in ~800ms in two different continents.
The articles I publish on my blog use AMP-HTML. I don't include media or ads at all, just text and fonts. These pages fully load in 200ms.
I conclude that the free CDN offered by Google is, frankly, a very attractive feature.
How do you know Cloudflare or other CDNs are participating with advertisers somehow, or responding to government tracking requests?
If the government can subpoena data from Google, are we sure they're not doing the same or more with CDNs, which don't seem as transparent as the consumer-facing companies.
Cloudfare publishes a transparency report https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency/, whether you trust it is another thing. Personally I have given up on privacy and now just hope that it can be made so that we are all equally naked.
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Using the same tool, I can see that my website loads in 440ms in the Netherlands. The homepage is 140kb, makes 6 requests, leverages caching and http/2 thanks to nginx etc.
Which is great and everything, but for a reader in Texas, that becomes 1.2s thanks to the fact that my site is hosted in London.
As you point out, AMP pages which weigh in at 4MB can be loaded in a seemingly underwhelming time: ~800ms. However, I think the important takeaway from this is that the pages load in ~800ms in two different continents.
The articles I publish on my blog use AMP-HTML. I don't include media or ads at all, just text and fonts. These pages fully load in 200ms.
I conclude that the free CDN offered by Google is, frankly, a very attractive feature.
Rule number 1: "Free" isn't.
And "Place a CDN in front of it" has been an available solution for... what, more than a decade?
If your site has meaningful traffic from multiple continents, you can spend the $10/mo it takes to add a CDN to it.
You can always put Cloudflare in front of a site to get the same CDN benefit.
How do you know Cloudflare or other CDNs are participating with advertisers somehow, or responding to government tracking requests?
If the government can subpoena data from Google, are we sure they're not doing the same or more with CDNs, which don't seem as transparent as the consumer-facing companies.
Cloudfare publishes a transparency report https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency/, whether you trust it is another thing. Personally I have given up on privacy and now just hope that it can be made so that we are all equally naked.