Can a meteor app ever be as fast and reliable as a static website?

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I would like to build a website sort of like UpWorthy or ClickHole in which key-word-optimized articles that have some sort of hopefully viral content in them can be easily passed around on social media. Would be nice to have ability to embed youtube content, since my site will rely heavily on drunk cat videos.

I’m interested in instantly grabbing the attention of the unwitting idiot wasting time on his laptop, so I want the article he clicked on to load in under 50 milliseconds and then instantly stand ready to be shared again, with some tempting “share this on social media” buttons.

That’s really about all there is to it. I was planning to use Meteor for this because that’s what I’ve been into lately and I’ve got a nice system for deploying meteor apps to digital ocean, but now I’m wondering whether a site of the kind I’m describing might better be built as a static website – there are fewer moving parts when things are static.

So I’m wondering whether this is an example of a situation in which Meteor is just not the best choice of technology, or whether there is some aspect of Meteor that enables it to suit this situation even if all of Meteor’s power is not brought into play

I am tempted by Meteor because, although it is always premature to think ahead, I sometimes fantasize about adding functionality to the site (log in with a social media account, for instance) for which Meteor’s slickness would really come in handy.

Also, I have a system for deploying meteor apps to digital ocean servers, but I’m wondering whether this sort of home-grown amateur deployment approach is wise when I’m tempting fate by trying to get something passed around on Facebook 30,000 times in one evening.

When you’re fishing for viral hits lightning only strikes once, so I’d like that not to be the time when a bug bares it’s teeth because some design or deployment choice I’ve made ends up having an unexpected side-effect under heavy load.

I’d appreciate any thoughts or advice anyone has.

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I have much more experience with Rails than Meteor. I do love both, however given your spec if you were my client I would highly recommend using Rails with something like full page caching. Throw memcache in front of Rails (really simple) and you can get 50ms response times if you keep your HTML tidy and clean.

I would not use Meteor for this because it’s large on first load.

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I don’t think Meteor is currently a good choice for a website focused mostly on content where the initial load needs to be super fast.

Meteor is optimized for interactive applications, so a more traditional HTTP-oriented web framework might be a better pick for this particular app.

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I think I’d say no for this :smile: (or may be soon)
We are running https://kadira.io with React + Meteor + SSR for weeks and it’s pretty fast like a static web app.

We defer script loading so JavaScript never blocks the rendering.
See Chrome PageSpeed Optimizer Report:

882×642 192 KB

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