Your site loads very quickly. (PageSpeed Score is 97 out of 100 -- only suggestions are for the gravatar.)

Would you care to reveal a little more about where/how you host your site?

I host it in DigitalOcean's New York datacenter (on a 512 MB VPS). They're pretty alright, but any VPS would do the trick. In fact, I only use a VPS because I can't properly set caching or gzip headers on GitHub pages.

As far as I know, the only thing that I do that most static sites don't is precompile gzip files for HTML pages, and minify pretty much everything (including HTML and images.) PageSpeed, Pingdom and RedBot were very helpful for providing web server optimizations. I would just observe and implement every tweak they mentioned; there's a lot you can do managing your own server that you can't with AWS or GitHub.

And make that 100/100. :)

I love how crazy fast your site is on my slow browser (chrome on iOS seems to drag when you've got 100+ tabs). I'm starting a blog network as a side project and setting it up as Jekyll for exactly this kind of performance.

Also love the honest assessment that in your repo's description that your setup is "far more neckbeard and far more work" :)

Interesting. It's still useful to have the data in REDIS so you can easily search through data server-side, but of course that could simply load from static JSON if + when REDIS is restarted/new data is added.