When comparing GitHub Pages vs Vultr, the Slant community recommends GitHub Pages for most people. In the question“What are the best hosting solutions for personal websites/blogs?” GitHub Pages is ranked 1st while Vultr is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose GitHub Pages is:
One of GitHub's features is a very powerful web editor which helps users edit or even create files right from the web browser, once the file is saved it's the same as a commit. Coupled with pages, this tool becomes even more powerful, giving users a free CMS that is easy to use and create.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro The ability to create and edit files on the web UI gives GitHub pages the same power as a small CMS
One of GitHub's features is a very powerful web editor which helps users edit or even create files right from the web browser, once the file is saved it's the same as a commit. Coupled with pages, this tool becomes even more powerful, giving users a free CMS that is easy to use and create.
Pro Supports Jekyll
A simple, blog-aware static site generator, Jekyll makes it easy to create site-wide headers and footers without having to copy them across every page. It also offers some other advanced templating features.
Pro Supports custom domains
A custom domain can be added by creating a CNAME file with the necessary domain in the root of the repository and adding/changing corresponding DNS entries.
Pro Free tier
Static websites can be hosted on GitHub Pages for free as long as the repository is public. Private repositories start at $7/mo.
Pro Allows for all the git features when building your site, too
Pro Great performance
Vultr consistently has great results in benchmarks compared to other VPS providers. It's true that VPS benchmarks are famous for not being very credible because they depend on a myriad of outside variables (most notably instances hosted on the same hardware and distance from the data-center). But still, Vultr scores consistently high in several different benchmarks such as CPU performance and MySQL compilation times.
Pro Wide geographic coverage
Vultr boasts more than a dozen datacenters across the world, ensuring maximal geographic coverage and the chance to increase loading speed wherever your largest demographics may be in the world.
Pro Your own IP Space (BGP AS)
You can announce your own BGP space across all of Vultr's datacenters worldwide.
Pro Custom ISO support
Pro Bitcoin payment support
Vultr supports Bitcoin payment. If you want to be extra careful about security and the security of your credit card/bank account/paypal account you can pay with Bitcoins.
Pro Quick-deploy apps
Vultr offers stock "apps", such as LEMP, Wordpress, Mincraft, Webmin, ownCloud, etc, that can be deployed instantly.
Pro Daily automatic backup
Vultr is capable of running daily backups with two most recent backups stored. Time of backup can be changed.
Cons
Con Unable to set cache expiry, must accept GitHub defaults (which are short)
Low cache expires - GitHub sets the cache-control: max-age header to 600 seconds, or ten minutes. Normally, you would set this value to a year so that it stays cached, and then use fingerprinting on your assets. Instead of serving style.css, you would serve something like style-62c887ea7cf54e743ecf3ce6c62a4ed6.css. As it stands now, assets are rarely going to be cached on repeat visits.
This will give a low score on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights with a 'should fix' recommendation around 'Leverage browser caching'.
For a high traffic site this may have implications
Con New hardware
Compare to DO hardware are old.
Con Sub-par documentation
While Vultr does offer documentation, it's not of a very high quality. Not everything is covered and it's more aimed at advanced users. So it wouldn't be a good choice for a beginner.
Con No billing-support on sunday
Added 30 dollars of funds to a new account on a Sunday, however Vultr did not allow me to deploy because of a insufficient funds message. Added support ticket, received the answer that billing related issues are only resolved on workdays.