Allow me to show you a comparison, between the enormous two-trillion-dollar web behemoth, and myself:

https://developers.googleblog.com/2024/03/build-with-google-ai-video-series-season-2.html
DOMContentLoaded: 652 ms Load: 1.73 s
https://jfr.im/blog/2024/03/rewriting-irc-log-timestamps/
DOMContentLoaded: 371 ms Load: 1.02 s

https://developers.google.com/
DOMContentLoaded: 709 ms Load: 2.92 s
https://jfr.im/
DOMContentLoaded: 125 ms Load: 125 ms

Ping to developers.google.com: 72ms
Ping to developers.googleblog.com: 93ms
Ping to jfr.im: 102ms

If you’re not in the middle of nowhere like me, the numbers present an even starker difference: many Google pages will take multiple seconds to load these days, even on a connection with a mere 10ms ping to them. Unless you have over 300ms ping, jfr.im will never even take a second to load!

How am I doing this? Am I spending thousands every month that I don’t have on a CDN (3.80 s / 4.33 s)? Nope, I’m paying $6/month for a crappy VPS with awful upstreams (528 ms / 1.36 s). And heck, my own connections to it bounce through another $10/month VPS with another provider (1.75 s / 2.10 s) first!

I’m beating Google for $6/month with a zigzag from Montana to Texas to New York!

Ugh. I hate the modern Internet. (772 ms / 811 ms)

See also: Dan Luu’s article, which approaches this same issue from the perspective of slow devices. (Sweet simplicity! 131 ms / 132 ms … shame it uses Cloudflare, which is bad for the whole Internet)