In reply to Jesse.

Jesse, thanks for your feedback. You are right that "major" is relative and whether Jetpack is right for your site or not depends a lot on a number of factors, including your personal preferences. We are very conscious of performance issues which is why we're constantly monitoring how Jetpack performs and shipping improvements (see our two recent releases).

We are actually looking forward Liuiza's results as an independent study like this will help us find even more ways of improving our product.

Your assertion that "any usage of Jetpack modules at all not only greatly hurt speed for most users, but also SEO" and that "[Photon] kills your on-site SEO" is sad to hear. This is most definitely not the case for the majority of our users (including WordPress.com users which uses the same technology) and if you've experienced this personally I would love to get more detail on specifically what sort of hit your performance and search engine rankings have taken when using our services. Our CDN, sitemaps, verification, and related posts features are actually designed to help your SEO and traffic (such as in this case study) and our indexing service is one of the few such plugins that many hosts allow because we take all the server processing load onto our infrastructure. Based on Google's recommendations, and like most CDNs, Photon images have canonical links so it shouldn't effect search engine rankings.

Around the lack of transparency, I understand your natural curiosity around how we manage our infrastructure but I'm sure you understand it wouldn't be in either our, or our users' interests, to disclose potentially compromising information of how we manage our data centers, locations, and other details. However we we have data centers around the world and you can ping a Photon domain from your machine to see where you land. Additionally, we do publicly show real-time activity on our data centres (each colour is a different data center and dark areas are mostly due to it being nighttime in that part of the world.)

As you know, Automattic (and Jetpack) are hugely committed to, and invested in, open source and transparency: we open source all the code we can (including Jetpack itself! and our new WordPress.com UI), we provide as much API access as we can (including for Photon), and as a company we publish bi-annual transparency reports.

If you have any additional or further questions I would be very happy to try and address them, either here or email me personally at richard.muscat@automattic.com.