Since I’ve switched all my web sites  providing only content to WordPress, I’m necessarily obsessed with performance and trying to find the most cost-effective way to flexibly run a site and get screamingly fast performance.  I say “flexibly” because I’ve gotten used to installing a variety of software directly from the command line.  This may be unnecessary as I trust the available set of WordPress modules more and more, but I still like the flexibility of managing my own Linux server.

So what’s fast enough?

An Amazon t2.micro instance provides 1.016s average total round trip on repeated viewings.

Dreamhost shared hosting averages 2.530.

But this wonderful post has me thinking that trying to draw averages may not be particularly helpful, and also implies that “max response time” values make real user experience not something that can be terribly well controlled.