(I'm the author.) This whole setup is built for a comparatively low traffic blog, so DNS caching won't help much. (On normal days I get ~100 visitors.) This is compounded by the TTL which is 60s to account for node failures.

The optimization level is in the sub 1 second range, so not having to pay one large RTT penalty for a DNS lookup is quite important. I've measured 300+ms RTT to Australia on the previous box I was using, that impacted the load times quite severely.