Here are some inputs from my end. Its possible to get 100/100 score easily on Google Page Speed insights. From SEO Aspect. anything with Tick marks in results is more than enough. Chasing page speed will end up us compromising on user experinece, tracking scipts and much more...
For instance if you use wordpress with too many scripts that will slow down the website load time drasctically. Above the fold content optimization, removing render blocking scripts are too complicated sometimes, For example, Google Analytics is not hosted on our servers, so in such case you cannot cache it or set expiration headers or compress it.
There is a work around over there like
https://github.com/jehna/ga-lite/
Which does help, but still they will fail to track sometimes, if you are someone like me who have funnels and other things setup and focus on conversion optimization. Then ignoring some page speed is good. This is from my own experince, I took my website to 100/100 on desktop and mobile in past, but i had to remove all the scripts that are intended to understand how visitors intreact with website.
So now, speed is not much in our head. We compromised a little, but still we have decent scores as we left some optimizations as it is.
No matter, if the website is on shared or vps or cloud. If the coding is not proper.. the website will not load optimal or get good scores...
I do not use pingdom.. we use multiple tools like
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
https://gtmetrix.com/
and
https://www.webpagetest.org/
some other inhouse tools.. as we are into digital marketing and other stuff... we take speed seriously and these are the inputs from my end.. Hope this is helpful to you.
