Bold claims require bold guarantees.
This site loads in under 200 milliseconds from anywhere in North America. If it doesn’t, I’ll personally refund every penny you paid to read it.
(The site is free. There’s no subscription. No paywall. No data harvested beyond anonymized analytics. The refund offer stands.)
The Numbers
From a midrange laptop on Wi-Fi, connected to Optimum cable internet in Connecticut, here’s what a typical page load looks like:
| Metric | Time |
|---|---|
| DNS Lookup | 50 ms |
| TCP Connection | 28 ms |
| TLS Handshake | 45 ms |
| Time to First Byte | 90-120 ms |
| Total Page Load | ~180 ms |
The homepage is currently 1,791 bytes. Not kilobytes. Bytes. That’s smaller than most favicons.
For comparison, the average web page in 2025 was 2.5 megabytes. This page is 0.07% of that.
From Across North America
Independent testing from servers around the continent:
| Location | Response Time |
|---|---|
| Dallas | 36 ms |
| Los Angeles | 33 ms |
| Vancouver | 91 ms |
| Miami | 167 ms |
Every major region is under 200 milliseconds. The guarantee holds.
And Beyond
The title says North America, but the site is cached globally. Here’s what that looks like:
| Location | Response Time |
|---|---|
| Germany | 28 ms |
| Japan | 42 ms |
| United Kingdom | 71 ms |
| Singapore | 179 ms |
Tokyo in 42 milliseconds. Faster than Miami reaches this server in Virginia.
Why So Fast?
Three things make this possible: static site generation, aggressive compression, and a global content delivery network.
Static Site Generation
This blog runs on Hugo, a static site generator. When I publish a post, Hugo converts Markdown files into plain HTML. No database queries. No server-side rendering. No PHP. No WordPress plugins loading eighteen JavaScript frameworks to display a paragraph of text.
The entire site—every page, every post—builds in about 15 milliseconds.
When you request a page, there’s nothing to compute. The HTML already exists. It’s just… served.
Compression
Every page is compressed with Brotli before it leaves the server. That 6,707-byte homepage becomes 1,791 bytes over the wire—a 73% reduction. The blog post you’re reading right now compresses by about 74%.
Your browser decompresses it instantly. You never notice.
Global CDN
The site lives on Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network with over 400 edge locations worldwide. When you request a page, you’re not connecting to a server in some data center thousands of miles away. You’re connecting to the nearest edge location—probably within 50 miles of wherever you’re sitting.
The content is already cached there. It doesn’t need to fetch it from an origin server. It just hands it to you.
The Architecture
Here’s the actual infrastructure:
You → CloudFront Edge (nearest location) → Cached HTML
↓ (only if cache miss)
S3 Bucket (origin)
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
| Component | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Hugo | Generates static HTML at build time |
| S3 | Stores the static files |
| CloudFront | Caches and serves files globally |
| Route 53 | DNS routing |
| ACM | Free SSL/TLS certificate |
There’s no application server. No load balancer. No database. No container orchestration. No Kubernetes. No microservices. Nothing to scale because there’s nothing to compute.
Edge Locations
CloudFront’s “PriceClass_All” setting means the site is cached at every edge location globally:
- North America: 30+ cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, Toronto, and Montreal
- Europe: London, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and more
- Asia Pacific: Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, Mumbai, Seoul
- South America: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro
- Middle East & Africa: Cape Town, Dubai, Tel Aviv
No matter where you are, there’s likely an edge location within a few hundred miles serving cached content at wire speed.
Protocol Support
The site serves content over HTTP/2 by default and advertises HTTP/3 (QUIC) support via the alt-svc header. Modern browsers will automatically upgrade to HTTP/3 on subsequent requests, reducing latency further through improved connection handling.
Verify It Yourself
Don’t take my word for it. Open your browser’s developer tools (F12), go to the Network tab, and reload this page. Look at the timing breakdown.
Or use one of these tools:
Run tests from different locations. I’ll wait.
The Cost
The base infrastructure costs about $2-5 per month:
| Service | Cost |
|---|---|
| Domain Registration ($13/year) | $1.08 |
| Route 53 (DNS) | $0.50 |
| S3 (storage + requests) | $0.06 |
| CloudFront (delivery) | $0.50-3 |
| SSL Certificate | Free |
| Base Total | ~$2-5/month |
I recently added AWS WAF for rate limiting, which adds about $6/month for protection against abusive traffic. That’s optional—the site worked fine without it—but some protection against runaway scripts felt prudent.
| With WAF | ~$8-11/month |
|---|
That’s still less than a streaming subscription for a globally-distributed, sub-200ms blog.
Why This Matters
Speed isn’t just a vanity metric. It’s respect for your time.
Every unnecessary millisecond is a choice someone made. A choice to add another tracking script. Another analytics pixel. Another A/B testing framework. Another cookie consent banner that loads its own JavaScript bundle. Another chat widget. Another notification prompt. Another “subscribe to our newsletter” modal.
This site makes a different choice: just show you the content.
The Guarantee
If this page took more than 200 milliseconds to load from anywhere in North America, you’re entitled to a full refund of the $0.00 you paid to access it.
For readers outside North America: the guarantee doesn’t technically apply to you, but based on the international benchmarks above, you’re probably still getting a faster experience than most websites. Consider it a bonus.
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