But I noticed that my DNS zone is quite different to how Github now tell you to do it (I have an A record to 204.232.175.78). So perhaps that is a factor.
Came here to say that. My github page (just flat html) loads in ~65ms. Granted, 65ms to load a couple kb of text isn't awesome, but it's not nearly slow enough to optimize for me.
That's not necessarily true. My own site is a Jekyll site. To host that on S3, I'd need to generate it first and upload the generated files as opposed to my source files. Now that's not really a big deal, but I do enjoy the convenience of only having to do a `git push` to deploy my site on Pages.
That being said, I notice times similar to another commenter above, around 1-2s usually. I don't think I've seen a five second load time.
I do something very similar to this, using Wintersmith and shell scripts. It essentially boils down to using two repositories for my site: the first being the raw/ungenerated files including the shell scripts, the second being the generated files that are served by GitHub pages.
s3_website[0] is a very neat solution to this. It integrates automatically with Jekyll. A simple 'jekyll build && s3_website push' uploads all your changes to S3. I'm using it to power all my static sites. It'll even automatically invalidate your Cloudfront distributions, if you like.
It could cost zero with a free host if I’d wanted to and still be as fast. The real performer here is CloudFlare and its edge cache, which doesn’t hit the server most of the time.
The linked site loads in less than half a second, but it costs $5 a month just for a simple page.