I actually benchmarked this a while ago. I use a lot of static pages that need to be absurdly fast.
I can definitively say that unless Google App Engine has substantially changed in architecture over the last 12 months, it is definitely not faster to host your static site there rather than on an nginx-based VPS with someone like Digital Ocean.
My tests showed load times on GAE-hosted static sites to be around 200ms - 300ms slower than a reasonably-optimised DO VPS.
It's possible, of course, that GAE would pick up some speed if you're loading the page from somewhere a long way away from the equivalent VPS, as GAE essentially comes with a built-in CDN (to the best of my understanding).
Thanks for actually doing the research on this. My "um, wow" was a response to people assuming Company XYZ's performance is amazing at face value.
When serving static pages, it is unlikely that any sort of engine will outperform something more like a CDN. I hate it when people just throw out the Google name as proof of performance/excellence/etc. Can we be a bit more scientific here?
Elie Bursztein leads Google's anti-abuse research, and recently mentioned on Google+ that he moved his personal web site to GAE: http://www.elie.net/
I can load his GAE-hosted web site in ~300ms, and there's a useful performance box on the right sidebar of his site that breaks down how long each component takes to load on GAE:
$ time curl http://www.elie.net/ > /dev/null
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 36146 0 36146 0 0 113k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 114k
real 0m0.316s
user 0m0.005s
sys 0m0.005s
I've been thinking of doing the same with my personal web site but haven't yet.
The great thing about static sites is that it's really easy to put them behind a CDN. Amazon Cloudfront is pay-what-you-use and seems pretty reasonable especially for smallish sites.
We currently use a mix of Akamai (100TB/month commit, static assets), Cloudfront (serves a static JS site out of S3, 10-50GB/month of usage), and Cloudflare (caches JSON get requests from an Elastic Beanstalk REST API). I've found Cloudfront to be faster than Akamai (although a bit pricier unless you're committing to 10TB+/month from a specific region), and Cloudflare to be faster than both (although with Cloudflare I can't invalidate individual files/URI paths, just the whole site, which I can live with).
Um, wow.