My response to this article on Quora

So, I have thought about this a little more.

It is not a case of what is the fastest website anymore.

The fastest web site is:

The above web site conforms to the HTML5 standards.

TCP ACK is not a website.

The question has changed, in my opinion, to what is the fastest way to load a website.

CDN or not, there is only one example that will be the fastest way to load a website if it is externally hosted.

Your next hop is the same router or on the same network.

An example of this can be found in the UK at my University, The University of Portsmouth. We are connected to the educational network provider, JANET.

We are connected with a pair of 10 Gbps fibre optic cables to the main JANET hub. At this hub is a whole host of switches, routers, interconnects, mail servers, web servers & storage servers.

If you were to host the fastest website form (as discussed above) on a web server there, I would be able to say you would find the fastest web site delivery.

This assumes there are no pesky students on the network.

I am a student & a researcher, so I can say the above, just!

Localhost is fast, local file storage is fast, but I am sure web server optimisation on a 10 or 100 Gbps fibre optic link will be very close if not faster.

10 GBps is a lot faster than the latest flash storage systems, even my favourite Intel NVMe flash modules.

Which is a little bit of a shock as I would like to build a couple of SANs with just Intel NVMe flash modules in compound RAID configurations?