This repository publishes a neutral, non-commercial and tracking-free static fixture used to compare hosting platforms. Every mirror receives the exact contents of site/.
The reader-friendly comparison, interactive rankings and live mirror links are published at firepixel.co.uk/host-off.
The fixture is deliberately noindex, collects no personal data, and links to the canonical Fire Pixel website only for attribution.
Two fixtures separate different parts of hosting performance:
/is the small 6 KB control page for connection, response-time and concurrency tests./full/is a faithful build of the Fire Pixel homepage with its real responsive image, CSS and fonts. Third-party analytics are removed so the host—not Google Tag Manager, CookiePal or Clarity—is what the test measures. Its manifest records every byte and SHA-256 hash.
- Cloudflare Pages — static edge delivery
- HostXNow — shared LiteSpeed, Ryzen 9 9950X plan
- MechanicWeb — shared LiteSpeed, Ryzen 9 7950X
- GitHub Pages — static edge delivery
- Hetzner CX43 through Cloudflare Tunnel — 8 vCPU / 16 GB
- Hetzner CX43 direct origin — the same backend over DNS-only HTTPS
- Hetzner CX23 — 2 vCPU / 4 GB, direct HTTP test endpoint
Control build 2026-09-01.2 has homepage SHA-256 02197b5844b06767fdc4d5225e36fe1e0d7dc807336bc095b44caa86104cb748 on every mirror above.
Full visual build 2026-09-01.3 has homepage SHA-256 35bbe17938a2da4c1fac521cdc0ec0bb19c196924cc8592bd34ec82f96f5f9e8 and manifest SHA-256 9d7d14d5d3c9c0d533ec4ad3f822298fd077ca78db9c4e79e347c512c223c3ee.
The visual build is live on every mirror above. Append /full/ to each mirror URL; for the direct CX43 origin use hostoff.firepixel.co.uk/full/. HostXNow was deployed through a temporary, directory-restricted FTPS account after its account-level SSH access refused connections; the temporary login was removed after the files were verified.
With the production Fire Pixel build in the sibling firepixel/dist directory:
node scripts/build-full-homepage.mjsThe generator fails if the expected analytics or canonical markup changes, rewrites the asset paths for every mirror, and writes site/full/manifest.json for deployment verification.
See the first dated benchmark for repeated single-request timings, HTTP/2 burst results and full-page Lighthouse evidence. The Dell OptiPlex mirror remains to be added.