WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2015)

122 thoughts on “WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2015)”

1. Pingback: WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (November 2014) | Review Signal Blog

2. Harsh Agrawal July 28, 2015 at 6:09 PM

   Kevin
   Great comparison & discovered many new hosting companies which can deliver better results.
   One question: When you talk about Godaddy, Are you testing on their managed WordPress hosting??
   Also how about Hostgator Optimized WordPress hosting which they launched few weeks back?

   Reply ↓
   1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJuly 28, 2015 at 10:08 PM

      Harsh,

      It’s the managed WordPress hosting from GoDaddy.

      This post took months to put together, I was pretty much done testing by the time HostGator released their offering. I’ve added them to the list for potential companies next year if they are interested.

      Reply ↓
      1. Kyler July 29, 2015 at 3:06 PM

         Hey Kevin,

         Nice list. Good to see ASO up on top 🙂 It’ll be better to see HostGator up there next year. Feel free to message me about it and I can get you setup.

         Reply ↓
         1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJuly 29, 2015 at 3:42 PM

            Thanks for reaching out Kyler, I’ll put your contact info down for next year and make sure I reach out to you for inclusion in the 2016 Edition.

            Reply ↓
3. phil July 28, 2015 at 6:19 PM

   Thanks again Kevin for what I think is simply the best review anywhere for managed WP!
   I’m not quite through reading it all, actually, but just found a tiny small detail you might want to change: GoDaddy Managed WordPress actually does offer staging (only one staging site, not two like Media Temple), and they also have GIT enabled.

   Reply ↓
   1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJuly 28, 2015 at 10:11 PM

      Phil,

      That feature spreadsheet was filled out by the companies themselves. Perhaps their offer changed from when it was filled out. I really wish I had a better way to present and maintain such a giant table of data. Problem is pretty much as soon as I publish, little details become out of date 🙁 It’s good to have comments like yours though to help inform everyone of updates and changes. So thank you!

      Reply ↓
      1. Phil July 29, 2015 at 4:05 PM

         Kevin,
         maybe even some folks at GoDaddy (and Media Temple, for that matter) don’t know all about their product.

         Actually, this is one of the main reasons I’m currently highly interested in Pressidium, and will probably soon host my clients there: their support is first-rate, by the highly knowledgeable founders themselves, not by some salesperson.

         Also, I found that GD’s offer has become quite a bit less attractive, with higher prices and lower max numbers of visits/months, which apparently they now enforce, as there’s an “overage warranty” one can buy – a year ago, they themselves said it was essentially “unlimited”.
         What I also like about Pressidium: if by some luck one’s account does go over the (admittedly rather low) max number of visits/month, they won’t shut you down or ask for more money immediately. Flexibility in Managed WordPress, now there’s a novel thing! 🙂

         Thanks again for your hard work!

         Reply ↓
         1. Vadim Mialik July 31, 2015 at 12:36 AM

            Also switched about 5 sites from Mediatemple to Siteground. So far pleased with the support. Its not ideal, but much better over Mediaemple in our experience. Which is a big performance metric for us that will trump many speed tests 🙂

            Reply ↓
4. Steven Gliebe July 28, 2015 at 10:49 PM

   Really great, Kevin. I found the data and your thoughts on SiteGround interesting (and comforting) since I’m switching to them from Media Temple’s unmanaged Grid for a few sites.

   Reply ↓
5. Mickey Kay July 29, 2015 at 3:52 AM

   Sooooooo good. These articles are invaluable. Thanks man!

   Reply ↓
6. Lukas July 29, 2015 at 6:36 AM

   This is a really professional and helpful report. Transferring judgement to independent party in person of Phillip Odom from LoadStorm gives more credibility to these results.

   Thank you very much for your hard work guys. Respect.

   Reply ↓
7. Nemanja July 29, 2015 at 8:20 AM

   I love the in-depth approach of your analysis. The only drawback I see is the possibility that some of the hosts gave you a supercharged account to get better results. Kinda like what WP Engine did, but without you knowing. To be honest, having a shared hosting without having to share it with anyone invalidates the test, because in real life you will never see that happen, hence you’ll never be able to see those results in practice.

   Ideally you could either compare the test account with a real one, or conduct the test without the hosts being aware.

   Looking forward to the next round!

   Reply ↓
   1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJuly 29, 2015 at 12:42 PM

      Nemanja,

      You’re absolutely correct. And I do my best to prevent that. There was one discrepancy where I found a host had accidentally given me more resources and I re did the entire testing keeping a close on it again. I do my best to detect these things. It’s a big deal for shared, but for the VPS instances it was a lot easier to check the resources and confirm I was only given the proper amount. I do my best, it’s not perfect, if that confidence isn’t enough for shared hosting for you, I would just look at the VPS performance then. I think it’s ok for Shared, but that’s my opinion and you’re entitled to your own.

      As far as doing it blind, I’ve tried. There are a few issues. The biggest two are cost (some of these companies cost hundreds per month to get accounts) and security. I need permission from their sysadmins to let my load testing through in a lot of cases. What I do also has the potential to affect real customers on their network which is something I don’t want to do. So having the companies working with me protects them better.

      I don’t disagree with you for a second that blind testing would be better, I just simply don’t have the resources and can’t bypass the security measures without them realizing what I’m doing. If you’ve got ideas for solving any or both of those issues, I’m always happy to hear them!

      Reply ↓
      1. Nemanja July 31, 2015 at 7:01 AM

         Actually, I do 🙂 Will follow up directly in the near future.

         Reply ↓
         1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJuly 31, 2015 at 12:33 PM

            I look forward to it, if you want to do so privately kevin at reviewsignal.

            Reply ↓
8. Jack July 29, 2015 at 8:43 AM

   Hi Kevin,

   Great review! Out of interest what was each site running? I see you mention each site was running the same dummy content and plugins, but do you have a list of the plugins and the theme that was used? (Sorry if I missed that in the post).

   Thanks!

   Reply ↓
   1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJuly 29, 2015 at 12:37 PM

      Thanks Jack.

      The dummy sites were literally almost nothing. Just a few pages on Twenty Fourteen theme with lorem ipsum text, a couple dummy images. The plugins were only what the hosting company installed actively running. I also had the import plugin, a user role manager and my custom WPPerformanceTester which was added after load testing. None of those plugins run on the frontend at all.

      You can still see one of the test sites that is up (with a domain I chuckle about every time): http://kevinohashibenchmark.com/

      Reply ↓
9. lucy July 29, 2015 at 9:19 AM

   why wasnt http://websynthesis.com/ put on the list,??????

   Reply ↓
   1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJuly 29, 2015 at 12:33 PM

      I addressed this at the beginning. They didn’t want to participate. They were included in Round 2 if you’re curious how they performed. They did very well in that round. https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2014/11/03/wordpress-hosting-performance-benchmarks-november-2014/

      Reply ↓
10. lucy July 29, 2015 at 9:31 AM

    you forgot to rate them in order, for your users convenience

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJuly 29, 2015 at 12:34 PM

       I rated them in groupings, I don’t think there is any set order that could be fairly applied.

       Reply ↓
11. Bryson T July 29, 2015 at 5:02 PM

    Kevin –

    Great work. Easily the most thorough hosting review I’ve seen yet (dating back to 2002!). The biggest problem with hosting reviews is all the affiliates supporting whoever pays them the most. While I see you’re tracking links here, I’m confident you’ve been at least marginally neutral, and that’s more than I can say for many others before you.

    I’m currently running a site on Media Temple’s shared hosting. It’s a decent service. The control panel is a custom build and takes some getting used to. Their support is always available and while they rarely know the answers to simple questions – like where my own php.ini file was – right away, they don’t pretend to be smart and give you bogus info. They also go get the right info for you and are pleasant to deal with.

    However, and this is for their GRID hosting, even handling just a hundred visitors at once with more than 1,000 posts in the database brings things to a crawl. A second site on the same type of hosting and running the same theme and plugins but with just 20 posts in the database loads every page in 1/4 the time.

    Cloudways looks good; like they’re on the rise actually. Sure beats catching them at the beginning of their decline like I did with Host Gator a few years back. But A Small Orange’s VPS cloud hosting is going to get a shot from me. I like having my sites hosted at a datacenter located less than 5 miles from my home office. Gives me the hands-on element I prefer.

    Any tips on their VPS Cloud packages, or any tier thereof, that you can pass on? My main site is a six-year-old WordPress site with a recently cleaned DB, but PHP frameworks with MySQL are my main focus. Any advice is appreciated.

    Thanks!

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJuly 29, 2015 at 6:32 PM

       Thank you for the high praise!

       Affiliate money can corrupt (and does in most cases in the web hosting review industry). You’re on point. That said, it’s also a really practical way to make money and I think if done correctly can make perfect sense. Full disclaimer, you’re right, I do have affiliate deals with some of the companies listed. Every company listed I have deals with except Kinsta, Pantheon, PressLabs, and WebHostingBuzz. If anyone wants to claim money is corrupting these rankings (And I don’t think you are making that claim at all, it’s just a common one), then I’m doing a terrible job at it. 3/7 of the top tier don’t have affiliate programs that I’m aware of and I make nothing from people signing up with them. I do these reviews very publicly and as transparently as possible with people from every company involved commenting, giving feedback and even providing advice on how they are done so that they are tested fairly compared to their competitors. It’s probably not perfect, but I’m happy to explain every decision I made and disclose everything possible so that these tests are repeatable by anyone.

       If you’re committed to giving ASO a try make sure you use their WordPress optimized VPS template. It’s what I ran the testing on and it’s blazing fast. It doesn’t have the normal cPanel control panel or anything though. So I hope you’re fairly comfortable with a command line. This testing was on the 2GB plan. I’d probably start there and see how it performs, $30/month puts in in class with the original shared offerings around that price point. If it isn’t fast enough, you could try emailing their support and asking for Ryan MacDonald, he’s their performance guru over there.

       Reply ↓

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13. Daniel July 29, 2015 at 5:50 PM

    Some interesting results and a couple new names to play with. Thanks for sharing!

    Reply ↓
14. Anh Tran July 31, 2015 at 4:48 AM

    Great comparison. However, I don’t see some big names in the list like DigitalOcean. Did you miss it?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJuly 31, 2015 at 12:27 PM

       Digital Ocean doesn’t really offer a managed high performance WordPress. I tested them in the first edition of this way way back (actual testing was in 2013). You can get a link at the top of this article if you want to read. The short summary is they are a hardware/VPS provider, not a WordPress provider. Don’t expect them WordPress stack to perform well. Lots of companies listed here are deploying on Digital Ocean and get phenomenal results, so the hardware is capable there. It just needs to be setup by experts.

       Reply ↓
15. Max Fein August 3, 2015 at 7:56 PM

    would love to see comparisons of these hosts for 100% HTTPS =)

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorAugust 4, 2015 at 3:37 AM

       Maybe next year 🙂

       Reply ↓

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18. Adam Robertson August 9, 2015 at 9:51 PM

    What about DO and ServerPilot? It’s a configuration I’d love to see compared to the others here. Right now, I’ve narrowed it down to that, LightningBase, Flywheel, and Pressidium. Pressidium seems to hit the price vs. quality sweet spot, but I feel weird purchasing hosting with servers in the UK (despite your findings here).

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorAugust 9, 2015 at 10:56 PM

       I tried Digital Ocean as a stand alone and they really aren’t in the same business. It’s a pretty default LAMP stack which just won’t hold up to these kinds of tests. That said, multiple companies in this test were using Digital Ocean for their servers (CloudWays, FlyWheel and I’m probably forgetting some others).

       As far as ServerPilot goes, it’s not really a hosting company, so I didn’t include it in this test. There are a lot of configurations out there if you go the DIY route like ServerPilot, but I don’t think they quite fit under this test. I am thinking about testing them separately though with competitors like easyEngine and other public configs.

       Reply ↓
19. Adam Robertson August 9, 2015 at 11:18 PM

    Makes sense. I’ve seen a few different comparisons between Cloudways and ServerPilot and ServerPilot seems to perform better, even without Varnish. How do you think DO/ServerPilot would stack up against something like Flywheel or LightningBase if you did happen to run them against each other? I know it’s all hypothetical and a guessing game… just looking for an opinion.

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorAugust 10, 2015 at 12:44 AM

       I have never used ServerPilot, so I don’t know. CloudWays generally performed better than FlyWheel, so if you’re saying ServerPilot outperformed them, I would suspect it would be better. LightningBase has been in the top tier for a while though, so that would be impressive if it outperformed them.

       Reply ↓
    2. Phil Braun August 19, 2015 at 7:13 AM

       FYI, I did quite a few tests of Serverpilot installs on DO, Linode and Vultr. The standard install (NGiNX in front of Apache) is lightning fast, especially if NGiNX serves cached html documents (created by e.g. WP Rocket or WP SuperCache). However, when testing with Blitz.io, it usually crashed at around 200 concurrent users, as Apache was somehow still eating RAM like crazy.
       When the setup was changed to a pure LEMP stack (no Apache), it held up a lot better, till around 900 concurrent users, or ~20 million visitors/day. That’s not too shabby.
       What was really noticeable: the WordPress backend was incredibly fast on Vultr and Linode LEMP setups (I wouldn’t recommend DO), faster than any other I’ve ever seen, even better than Kinsta. If you or your clients are working a lot inside WP, that’s really nice to have.

       Oh, and a quick note re: Pressidium – they are planning to expand and have US-based data center soon, as far as I know.

       Reply ↓
       1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorAugust 19, 2015 at 11:15 AM

          Thanks for sharing those results Phil. Have you published/documented them anywhere?

          Reply ↓
20. Adam Robertson August 10, 2015 at 1:19 PM

    Thanks Kevin, good stuff!

    Reply ↓
21. Frank Weiss August 11, 2015 at 3:21 PM

    what about custom shops like isprime.com? they host some big fish afaik. i think having metrics for their type of managed wp product would be interesting.

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorAugust 11, 2015 at 3:46 PM

       I don’t see any information about managed WordPress hosting there?

       Reply ↓
       1. Frank Weiss August 11, 2015 at 3:58 PM

          you’re right, from what i understand you’d get a managed vps or dedicated server, and have them install their wp stack on there. i also found isprime.com/wordpress.html

          Reply ↓
22. Michiel August 13, 2015 at 7:29 AM

    Ha Kevin,

    Thanks a lot for this elaborate analysis, which helps to make an educated choice between hosting providers. I am wondering, did you have any experience with http://www.fastcomet.com/? I wonder how they are performing compared to others.

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorAugust 13, 2015 at 12:12 PM

       Never heard of them. I put out an open call in the WordPress community to nominate companies before I started the last round to make sure I got as many as possible that are truly in the playing field. A lot of companies offer ‘WordPress Hosting’ but most don’t really do much special beyond an installer. I don’t know if that’s what FastComet is, but unless they reach out or you can tell me they are the real deal, I can’t simply include everyone that says they do ‘WordPress Hosting.’ My tests make companies look very bad if they aren’t really in high performance WP hosting business, and making companies look bad is not my goal. So if you’re using them, you can test for yourself using LoadStorm/Blitz/WebPageTest to see what the results look like. If you’re just curious, you can email/call/whatever them and let them know about these tests. I’ve been accepting any company that is interested in participating and respecting those that don’t wish to be included. So they are more than welcome to reach out to me for inclusion in the 2016 edition.

       Reply ↓

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25. Thomas Zickell August 25, 2015 at 4:30 AM

    Hey Kevin,
    Great job with the update I’m glad that you mentioned the difference between environment and VPS.

    One thing I believe may have a unique circumstance that is not yet talked about to my knowledge.
    WP engine is he’s going to keep shared resources from using more than a predetermined. I know that a regular WPE shared environment. Would be very powerful if 10 sites are going to get the best performance. They would not use more than
    a certain amount of preset resources.

    I Agree your findings and I’m happy to see the passwor your findings and I’m happy to see that PressLabs is proving to be an excellent company. Last but not least Pagely’s VPS is using Redis & HHVM it allso has some other things that I believe balance it out in terms of power.
    Because I have the Pagely shared plan & VPS-1
    In my testing is the VPS faster than the shared plan environment.

    Is there a chance that you will offer the VPS in your next test? Please don’t get me wrong I agree with you 100% they are a force to reckon with and my favorite.

    Great review I look forward to hearing more about WP engine environment keep in mind They have moved from Linode to Rackspace.
    This too may have to do with their increased performance?

    All the best,
    Tom

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorAugust 25, 2015 at 12:27 PM

       Thanks Thomas.

       VPS can definitely be faster, but shared can outperform smaller VPSs sometimes because there is a larger shared pool of resources at its disposal. That was all I was trying to communicate.

       As far as testing goes, I honestly couldn’t tell you right now what next test will look like. I think some major changes are due to fit with how the market has evolved since I started. If you have some ideas, I’m all ears 🙂

       Linode is pretty well known for good performance. Although, I have no idea how it would stack up against RackSpace. And your Pagely is due for a big performance increase as they switch to Aurora on Amazon.

       Reply ↓

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28. Esteban September 5, 2015 at 8:07 PM

    Great post. Can you review https://www.neolo.com next time? thanks!

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorSeptember 5, 2015 at 8:30 PM

       Do they do managed WordPress?

       Reply ↓
29. Casey September 14, 2015 at 9:44 PM

    Hi Kevin. Your reviews are great. I’m looking for a new host and have narrowed it down to Pantheon and Pressidium. Pressidium is more affordable as I need to host 3 sites. Does the fact that they are UK-based hurt performance for a primarily US audience? Their site shows servers in the US.

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorSeptember 14, 2015 at 10:39 PM

       Casey,

       Thanks!

       They were very marginally slower than most of their US based peers to US locations. That said, look at the results in Blitz and LoadStorm. There is average, max and min on Blitz specifically. They had a 1ms spread, it was incredibly reliable, albeit slower because of the distance. But we’re not talking a lot of time in the grand scheme of things at 100-200ms difference. Worth asking them, they probably have some ways to speed up US based delivery (eg CDN, or new datacenter locations in US). I have to imagine they will be adding US locations because of the demand. Could have happened since I did my testing. I’d reach out to them directly first and see what they say.

       Reply ↓
30. Leo September 16, 2015 at 9:00 AM

    Hey Kevin!

    Any thoughts on GoDaddy’s latest managed WP hosting? Also, any suggestions if our website is catered to Malaysia/Singapore?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorSeptember 17, 2015 at 7:31 PM

       Leo,

       Performance wise, it’s done very well in these tests in the past. It ran into some issues this time at the very end of some of our load tests. Talking with them team after these results were published, they think I triggered some security features rather than their servers not being able to handle it. It’s certainly plausible if you look at the results. As far as everything else connected to it, I can’t really say much. I have a lot of review data on GoDaddy but it’s not separated by which plan they are on. GoDaddy doesn’t have a great reputation and I know they are very actively working to try to change that around with the new team they’ve brought in. What would you experience as a customer? I’m not sure beyond pretty good performance.

       If you’re in Malaysia/Singapore, I know Amazon has a data center in that region. So any company built on their infrastructure might fit well (albeit Amazon isn’t cheap). Pagely and CloudWays come to mind as both using Amazon.

       Reply ↓

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32. Josh September 20, 2015 at 8:18 AM

    Thanks for this article!
    TrafficPlanetHosting was my previous hosting, but they seem to have weird sleeping technology, where the website quickly goes to sleep or something, and then slow to wake up when you start surfing it. The speeds were all over the place.
    Tried WPengine, wasn’t much faster for the price.

    thanks to your article, i found ASmallorage. I signed up with their level II Cloud VPS, installed the wordpress lemp, and its super blazing fast, the speed is consistent. Loving it.
    I wish there were a way for them to give you some credit for linking me to them.

    I did provide their sales staff with a link to this article, so maybe they’ll give you a tight handshake or something ha.

    thanks again for breaking all this down.

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorSeptember 20, 2015 at 11:59 AM

       Glad it helped you Josh 🙂

       Reply ↓
    2. Nat Finn October 18, 2015 at 5:29 AM

       Hey, Josh (and Kevin),

       My wife and I were looking for managed WP systems when we came across the site.

       Traffic Planet: that sounds like that (don’t know the specific phrasing) the virtual hosting allocation (I’m told) folks like BlueHost / HostMonster … and other economy hosting plans offer. It allocates memory to your site according to history and then pumps it up when they notice the spike. The only problem: that spike is usually because you had a post go viral or had marketing / advertising efforts thrown to it. Damn. Read good things about TPH, too.

       Kevin: do you think this tech could also be found in others you have tested?

       And. I’ll send you a beer if you test Traffic Planet next year!!!

       Reply ↓
       1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorOctober 19, 2015 at 4:22 PM

          Nat,

          All the companies are opt-in. I’ve got them on my list for 2016, but if they aren’t interested, I won’t test them.

          As far as the tech, it’s possible. Different companies are going to have different scaling strategies. I have no idea what they are using and how it compares to others, so I can’t really say anything definitive.

          Reply ↓

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34. Garry September 26, 2015 at 5:54 AM

    Hi Kevin,

    Love your work!

    I was wondering : I’m looking at lightning base.

    My audience is in France and their datacenter is in Chicago.

    Even if you proofed theyre awesome, would I still get great performance that far from the server?

    I know they provide a cdn but would LB + cdn outperform lets say futurehosting or knownhost in Londonien?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorSeptember 26, 2015 at 10:09 AM

       I don’t know futurehosting. KnownHost isn’t specialized in WordPress. If your option was specialized WP in US vs local normal hosting. I would generally expect latency to be smaller than slowness of a normal host. If you were configuring a lot of optimizations so your KnownHost (VPS I am assuming) is similar, the performance would probably be better locally.

       You can look at Pressidium in the test results. Their plan was EU based and being tested from the US. That should give you an idea of how much latency it would add (not a huge amount with a well performing host), but a bit noticeable. You could consider them as an option too if you wanted a top notch EU based company.

       Reply ↓
       1. Garry September 26, 2015 at 10:55 AM

          Thanks for your fast reply, and sorry for the hard to understand message : I was typing on my phone.

          I looked at Pressidium results. So you are saying that the 300 ms average difference (webpagetest.org results) are explained only by distance ?

          If so, I’ll try them, thanks for the info. (and I’ll click your link 🙂 )

          BTW, Knownhost is a rather respected host at WHT.

          Reply ↓
          1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorSeptember 26, 2015 at 11:28 AM

             Garry,

             I’m familiar with KnownHost and they have a quite good rating here at Review Signal too (https://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/13/knownhost/), but they aren’t in the same class as the managed WP providers. For a managed VPS, they look great, I have no idea how well they manage WP, that’s all.

             As far as WPT results, yeah, if you look at the locations, it was VA, CO, FL, CA as the testing states. Also look at the blitz results. Despite having a higher average ping, it was incredibly consistent. If you’re really curious about latency and location, there is this cool chart http://www.verizonenterprise.com/about/network/latency/ it gives you some idea of how distance/geography affects latency. The Atlantic ocean seems to add 70-80ms naturally, on top of whatever other routing needs to happen.

             If you were considering Pressidium and just worried about latency, they should be way better in Europe since their servers are based there. I would give them a try 🙂

             Reply ↓
35. Sunil Gulati October 18, 2015 at 4:23 PM

    Hi

    My experience with a small orange VPS has been HORRIBLE : (
    Lot of downtime and issues with no one monitoring servers or responding on time ( phone support is no 24×7 ) and you just need to create email tickets. Chat has like 30 people waiting so not an option – specially if you are on the road.
    On top of that – they give you a VPS server in default configuration with no speed optimization or backup which I learnt the hard way
    Site issues – lost code — oops no backup
    Site slow of many days, looking google ranking — ASO said yes, we can make it master as lot of services are no installed. WHAT — why were they not installed to being with – why would you give shitty configuration server to a customer.

    What server or type of account did you use ? I am trying to see of their Clementine Managed is any better than their VPS – before I learn my lesson and move on to a hopefully better hosting company
    Lost too mush revenue and google rankings because of their poor service

    Neal

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorOctober 19, 2015 at 4:24 PM

       I tested with the LEMP WordPress optimized VPS stack, not the default.

       I’m also very sorry to hear about your experience. Is the support issue recent? I saw something about them having issues because they were taking over the support operations of another web host that has perhaps overloaded their team. Not sure what’s going on with that.

       Reply ↓

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39. Abdul Ghani November 23, 2015 at 9:55 AM

    Thanks for the awesome work!

    I was wondering.

    ASO’s results are great, and compared to other providers, their pricing isnt (openly) based on number of hits.

    However, I see you were using the LEMP setup, is that free? Plus, is that setup compatible with cache plugin like wprocket?

    I also understand LEMP setup isnt available with cpanel. Do you have experience with their NGINX optimized setup for cpanel?

    And last question, if I May : will 1 higher plan with more RAM provide more speed or is it useful only if there are several websites on the VPS?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorNovember 23, 2015 at 5:27 PM

       A few don’t base their pricing on hits (but many do, you are right).

       The LEMP stack is free, it’s a template you can choose on your VPS. I don’t know about it’s compatibility with WP Rocket, you would need to ask them.

       You are correct, no cpanel and I haven’t tested their nginx optimized cpanel. In general, just switching to Nginx alone doesn’t instantly give awesome performance. If you’re curious, you can take a look at some test results I published of different configs (apache vs nginx) https://github.com/kevinohashi/WordPressVPS/tree/master/loadtest_results Nginx with some optimization be amazingly fast, but out of the box, Apache is comparable. I’m not sure how/what the ‘optimized’ nginx configuration is actually optimized for.

       Adding more ram can make some things faster (larger caches) but really it’s a case by case kind of thing. Adding more doesn’t always make it faster unless it’s the current bottleneck you’re experiencing.

       Reply ↓
       1. Abdul Ghani November 27, 2015 at 2:15 AM

          Thanks for your answer Kevin.

          I just talked to ASO support over live chat, and they told me something I think interested people should know :

          => About the Lemp stack :

          Abdul Ghani 10:48:24 am
          I’ve read good things about yoru Lemp stacks, but there are 2 versions. What are the differences please ?

          Support Operator 10:49:40 am
          Oh gosh, I can’t say for sure, while we do offer LEMP and the other Linux OS’s, as well as the 2 window’s OS’s, we don’t actually do support for anything except for the CentOS with cPanel servers, so we don’t have any training on the other Operating systems, I do apologize for not being able to answer your question D:

          Abdul Ghani 10:50:00 am
          not answering is ok
          but you say there is no support ?

          Support operator 10:52:26 am
          Not for the servers other than the Centos with cPanel servers, we can reboot the server, and make sure it’s on, but the support for them is extremely limited, like we can’t check internal errors, such as if httpd or something like that were to crash, we wouldn’t be able to help with that on a LEMP server but could on the cPanel server’s. I totally understand wanting the LEMP server, but if you’re ordering with us, I would recommend the cPanel server, so we can help out if needed.

          => And about the Nginx “optimized” version :

          Abdul Ghani 10:53:49 am
          fair enouhj
          enough
          and what about the cpanel Nginx optimized version
          does that come with complete support ?

          Support operator 10:55:06 am
          We do a bit more for that, but the standard Centos with cPanel are the ones we actually do the full support for. On the Apache servers, we can install Nginx as a reverse proxy, to help with server loads

          Abdul Ghani 10:56:09 am
          what kind of stuff isnt covered with that version?

          Support operator 10:57:03 am
          We wouldn’t be able to make any changes to web server, like any issues you might run into with Nginx, we could trouble shoot apache, where we wouldn’t be able to do so with Nginx. We could assist with things inside cPanel, or WHM themselves though with that.

          => I was really going for the LEMP stack, but since I don’t have the skills to run the server myself, I’ll have to do otherwise.

          Reply ↓
          1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorNovember 27, 2015 at 3:20 AM

             Good to know and glad you shared that information here. Thank you.

             Reply ↓

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42. Scott December 11, 2015 at 5:02 PM

    Interested in opinions…which of the higher scoring, lower priced hosts tested here best suits a small eCommerce business with very little server/hosting infrastructure knowledge? Siteground seems promising, but they don’t really play up the “managed” aspect of their hosting. My Flywheel trial was relatively painless, and they’re supportive, but costly for more than 1 site. Cloudways provided decent KB articles on setup, and how to monitor and manage server health, but their support staff weren’t very helpful about WordPress-specific issues.

    I’d rather not have to fiddle with nodes, cache and cdn settings, nor do I have the time to learn about them. So I am willing to pay for truly managed hosting.

    Reply ↓
43. Cardigan December 26, 2015 at 11:34 AM

    Hi Kevin, for DreamPress did you try with HHVM or OpCache?

    DreamHost claims that with HHVM the load time time was 4x faster: dreamhost.com/blog/2015/05/27/dreampress-2-the-evolution-of-managed-wordpress-hosting-at-dreamhost/

    If you have not tried HHVM, do you mind re-running the test with HHVM and let us know whether you see a change in performance?

    Thanks in advance.

    Best

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorDecember 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM

       I used whatever was default at the time (I don’t believe HHVM was). I will be re-running tests for 2016 in the coming year and updating then.

       Reply ↓
44. Vance Davies December 26, 2015 at 11:36 AM

    You guys should test kickassd.com in your next roundup. They offer managed wordpress hosting with Docker integrated into cPanel which adds huge flexibility and power. If your site starts to out grow their shared hosting than simply start dividing it up into Docker containers from within cPanel.

    Reply ↓
45. Lars Schowalter December 30, 2015 at 2:28 AM

    Hi Kevin,

    thanks for this epic article. I’ve been looking for a new hosting provider for the last couple of weeks..No idea why I didn’t find your review earlier.
    I still have a rather small site with around 7.000 monthly page views but it’s growing quickly. After a lot of going back and forth, I narrowed it down to either Cloudways or Pressidium.
    My target audience is from the US which would suggest better speed performance with Cloudways when I select a US data center. Also, the pricing is pretty spectacular. I guess the 15$ option would be more than enough for me at the moment.

    Pressidium, on the other hand, has a really cool concept and I like their style a lot. Everything is geared towards WordPress plus the support appears to be top notch. Just wrote them an email with a few questions and got a reply from the co-founder Andrew, who exceeded all expectations with his thorough answer, addressing all my concerns in great detail. Drawbacks are the potentially slower loading times for US users and the limitations in regards of monthly visits.

    I have to admit that I’m stuck at this point. What would your suggestion be?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorDecember 30, 2015 at 2:20 PM

       Lars,

       I’m glad you liked the article. I wish I could tell you why you didn’t find it, probably a lot of other people spamming crappy affiliate links instead of real information 🙁

       For 7k visitors a month, CloudWays would be more than enough, you are correct.

       Pressidium does have a very different concept from CloudWays and you seemed to pick up on their value-add. Andrew is a very nice guy in my experience too.

       I can’t give you an answer, but I can tell you how I think about these things.

       Both have very good performance. Especially at the level of traffic you’re experiencing, I think it’s a non issue. That includes ping. Pressidium was still pretty fast to the US in my experience.

       So what about price. What is your budget? What are you willing/comfortable to spend on good hosting? If both fit within those bounds, you start to look at cost scaling. CloudWays scales better on a pure price stand point. Except you got to experience some of the Pressidium support which seemingly impressed you. How much more would you be willing to pay for that?

       I personally value support quality over almost everything else (assuming some minimum service standard is met). I’m willing to pay a fair bit extra for it too. Not everyone is like that. Not every business can justify it. Not every site can justify it. I tier my hosting based on what it is. Fun hackathon project? Dump it on an unmanaged VPS with the cheapest provider that works. Important client eCommerce site? Expensive, managed hosting with SLA. That’s how I think about these things, and I hope that helps you think about your choice. I don’t think between those two there is a wrong choice. But the question in your mind seems to be will you regret not paying the extra for what you think is excellent support. Good news is… you can always move later (although it can be painful sometimes to migrate).

       Reply ↓
46. Lars December 31, 2015 at 12:16 PM

    Hey Kevin,

    thanks for your extended reply. I think you’re right about the value of great support.
    I just made the decision and was about to purchase a plan at Pressidium when their website didn’t response anymore. Apparently, their upstream provider is experiencing a DDoS attack which causes those downtimes.

    I’ve got to admit that this alienates me a little bit. Is this something that can happen to any WordPress hosting provider or should I be worried indeed?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorDecember 31, 2015 at 1:44 PM

       It can happen to anyone. How often and how well they are able to deal with it may vary based on underlying provider. But I don’t have any definitive information to provide about who is better at security.

       Reply ↓
47. Alpine January 1, 2016 at 1:32 PM

    ASO looks interesting for VPS but they apparently don’t have any phone number to call nor do they have even a simple contact form. How in the hell does a company do business without any method of communication?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJanuary 1, 2016 at 2:55 PM

       In light of recent events, I wouldn’t recommend them anyways. They’ve have some major issues since I published this.

       Reply ↓
48. Lars January 3, 2016 at 10:10 AM

    An Update from my side. I created a test account at Cloudways and their Speed is alright but the Support is just a bad joke. The people I talked to in the live chat didn’t even have a basic understanding of WordPress.

    That’s why I went with Pressidium and I’m quite happy so far. Speed is good (Almost as fast as Cloudways from US Servers and faster from Europe) and the support is superb. I also like their interface a lot. It’s clean and modern and it’s not overloaded with too many options.

    The only thing that’s bugging me just a tiny bit is their way of counting visits. Meaning that all the bot traffic counts as visits as well. Bot traffic is usually multiple times the amount of regular visitors so you pretty quickly get to their limits. Even though they don’t seem to be too strict when it comes to overage and won’t charge you right away, this feels a little bit restrictive.

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJanuary 3, 2016 at 3:30 PM

       Well, I’m glad you’re happy with your choice. I have never been a fan of this restricting by visitors, but it seems like that’s the way this niche went. I suspect it will go away in a few years as the competition continues to go on. But that’s all just speculation and commentary at this point.

       Reply ↓
    2. Doug Belchamber January 4, 2016 at 4:17 AM

       Another vote for Pressidium… Support is second to none. We’ve worked with tens of managed hosts in the past 18 months and these guys are another level.

       They also seem to have a focus on always improving – my sites have got faster since I first signed up, and some even feel like they are a native app as they are so damn quick!

       I’m not affiliated with them in any way… just a happy customer of nearly a year.

       Reply ↓

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50. Josh January 13, 2016 at 8:07 AM

    Hi Kevin, I came back to read your article in hopes to find another host. I found your article back in September, which i then commented (scroll up 😛 ) and signed up with ASO, and loved them due to the speed, and loved them so much that even recently renewed my hosting with them for another whole year, which I am now regretting.

    Their support has never been great, which I was okay with as long as they kept their servers working and online so that I could resolve the issues my self, which I have been able to do, until last month.

    Their entire VPS system seemed to have been down for nearly an entire week, without much word from them. I gave them the benefit of the doubt that something major was going on, so i hung with them and waited it out.

    However, since then i’ve been having weird issues with their hosting.
    For example, their system banned my ip from accessing the site via SSH, FTP, etc. I assume that I can only access my website now is because I use cloudflare, and perhaps it allows my IP to get in.

    I created a support ticket a few days ago about this, which they replied, and had me to a traceroute, which showed that the block was after connection to their colo4 datacenter.

    Days go by, no reply to that ticket, and im still unable to access my files via ssh or ftp from my computer.
    I can do it from my phone, but that’s not a workable method, but at least I was able to login to shh via the phone to generate a backup for a server move.

    Finally had it with them and their lack of proper (or any for that matter) support. It’s too bad, because even though I’m having these issue, my site still loads fast on their server, and i hate the idea of leaving, but i deserve better dammit! ha.

    Oh well, we all knew it was inevitable that this would happen since EIG owns them.

    I am leaning towards moving to Cloudways digital ocean., You seem to have given them a pretty good rating. I’m only kinda hesitant due to them not accepting paypal as payment.

    Woujld you recommend Cloudways DO? The rest of the hosts all seem to go by visits, which isnt very attractive to me, even if i am the only visitor to my site.

    thanks again for the info and great article.

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJanuary 13, 2016 at 3:26 PM

       Josh,

       So sorry for the recent experiences. ASO has gone down a toilet. I’m working on writing an article about it and the implications it has for this site going forward. But that’s the way the world of web hosting works sadly. Companies are good until they aren’t. Sometimes it’s slow decline, other times it’s an abrupt tanking. Nobody is immune from that sort of thing either sadly.

       Immediately going forward, you can try an SSH tunnel or using a VPN on your desktop to get around an IP block. I’ve locked myself out of servers before. May also want to look into unbanning your IP from your phone (SSH), may be the quickest solution. I’m glad you can backup your stuff. I personally back everything important up to Amazon S3, there’s a nifty tool called s3cmd which is a command line utility to upload things. With a few commands you can zip up whole directories and throw them onto S3 where I am far more comfortable that they won’t be lost (makes moving easier too). Same goes with database (mysqldump –all-databases).

       As far as other options, CloudWays is less managed than most of the companies I think. Their tech is solid, interface is unique (not in a bad way), but if you’re comfortable hopping on a command line, it could be a good fit. It’s definitely at the cheaper end of the spectrum and you get a lot of bang for your buck so to speak since they’re only charging a margin on your VPS. They are nice guys, from what I’ve read the support probably won’t wow you, but for budgetary reasons they may make the most sense. And I would definitely recommend regular offsite backups, in case you aren’t happy… for this exact scenario.

       Hope that’s helpful and sorry about ASO 🙁

       Reply ↓
       1. Josh January 14, 2016 at 3:52 AM

          Oh wow Kevin, triggered me into thinking that perhaps I’ve locked myself out. Used SSH via my phone to disable the iptables service, and surely enough I was able to connect via my desktop. I was then able to find my ip that was banned in iptables, and tried for a couple of hours to remove the ban, but it kept loading it back upon each restart.

          Finally assumed something else must be happening. Did some more research and came across this: https://kb.asmallorange.com/customer/portal/articles/1603731-advanced-policy-firewall-and-brute-force-detection-overview
          Cant find it directly on their site, thank god for google. using the info there i realized APF blocked me days ago for exceeded login attempts. removed that and all is good now.

          All this could’ve been resolved days ago if ASO actually had some sort of support and would’ve make an actual attempt to assist me. If iwere them this would’ve been the first place I would’ve suggested to check. How was I to know they had all this stuff in the background?

          I am still looking to move to another host. I am perfectly find with commandline. thats all ASO Cloud VPS is. I’ve found my way using ssh and google, ha

          I’m also interested in Godaddy WordPress Hosting. I’ve tried their shared hosting years ago and really didn’t like it. Was slow, and their control panel and other systems were so laggy. would take forever to get anything done.
          I assume that their wordpress system is more modern. I might check it out, why not for the price?

          Only thing i dislike about godaddys offering from looking at the plan details is they limit based on views. They do allow for alot of views in their offerings so it may not be an issue.

          I look forward to your article about ASmallOrange.
          I must say their speed and uptime has been very good and consistent for me, besides that week long downtime in December. They’re a bit confusing. not sure whats going on over there.

          Reply ↓
          1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJanuary 19, 2016 at 2:48 PM

             Josh,

             The article is now live: https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-small-orange/

             Reply ↓

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52. Svet February 18, 2016 at 9:21 AM

    Hi Kevin, I would love to hear your opinion on good hosts for woo commerce and why?

    Really enjoyed reading your reviews!

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorFebruary 19, 2016 at 2:33 AM

       I honestly couldn’t tell you. WooCommerce isn’t my area of expertise. I’m not sure how it is materially different than traditional WordPress installs and I’ve not done any testing with it to give any sort of unbiased opinion.

       Reply ↓
53. chen March 3, 2016 at 8:33 AM

    Hi Kevin

    I just wanted to say your site is refreshing. I especially like the stress tests and results that you are sharing (most sites just do a simple speed test). I was wondering if your ranking algorithm takes into account support response times or support satisfaction? For me pricing is not an issue, I want to find a host that will respond quickly and have knowledgeable staff on hand. I don’t want to wait until something happens to only find out that while everything else is good, the support sucks.

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorMarch 3, 2016 at 10:55 AM

       chen,

       It doesn’t. I don’t think one person can measure that in an unbiased way. The main Review Signal site does have support ratings for some of the companies (any company with [Review] on this post). It’s based on how many people are saying positive things with regards to support versus negative ones. It’s a decent proxy, but by no means perfect. Different users have different expectations and use cases. If price really isn’t an issue and you need SLA level guarantees, you can talk to some of the high end companies. They definitely offer high end support, but it costs a substantial amount.

       Reply ↓

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55. Milena Böhm, Idesignstudio March 19, 2016 at 6:27 AM

    Great great article! We are using LightningBase to host our in-house and clients projects more then 3 years already. Chris at LB really knows what to do. All their support had been tremendous help for us through the last years and the service is rock solid. We are using their Amsterdam based servers. Highly recommended from an extremely happy client!

    Reply ↓
56. Abid Bhatti March 25, 2016 at 5:53 AM

    Much obliged to you for the rundown I at last settled on Bluehost after some real downtime with Hostgator. So far I am exceptionally cheerful and have not had any issues to talk about. It’s really stunning how great the administration is for such a shabby cost.

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorMarch 25, 2016 at 7:10 AM

       You are aware it’s the same exact company right? HostGator and BlueHost are both Endurance International Group (EIG)

       Reply ↓
57. Andrei March 30, 2016 at 2:45 PM

    Hi Kevin,

    Any thoughts on LiquidWeb’s managed WP hosting plan? Looks like a newer service, so I guess that’s why it wasn’t part of this post?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorMarch 30, 2016 at 10:05 PM

       No thoughts. It came out after I published this. It will be included in 2016 edition of this testing.

       Reply ↓
       1. Andrei April 3, 2016 at 12:06 PM

          But any idea on when the 2016 should be up? Mid Summer?

          I’m with ASO now, but I really need to switch, the constant downtimes are annoying. Got a pretty big site, but can’t really afford Kinsta or FlyWheel, so I’ll probably just give LiquidWeb a try.

          Reply ↓

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59. Matt April 6, 2016 at 7:49 PM

    Awesome review! Pretty much in line with my user experience as a customer at a lot of these hosts, despite never formally testing any of them. I’ve always kept a dedicated at Liquidweb over the years, but they didn’t have managed wordpress hosting until recently. I’d love to see them added to the list for the next run!

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorApril 6, 2016 at 11:31 PM

       I am beginning preparations for 2016 and LiquidWeb is on the list of companies I reached out to. I haven’t yet heard back though yet, so if you want to bug @LiquidWeb about participating… https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1QUZkp58tmVWTtNfareDAR6Bqz9lIZ5ClVKWKu4vdORg/viewform

       Reply ↓
60. Lucian Florian May 5, 2016 at 1:08 AM

    First of all fantastic and most helpful review. Thank you for putting this together.
    I have tried several on the list and Bluehost is pretty bad. Flywheel not good either. WpEngine is good. The best is Kinsta

    I would be very interested to see how a fully loaded website behaves on each host. I don’t believe the basic WordPress websites reliever the most accurate results. Here are some ideas:
    – install woocommerce and add 40+ variations. This is known to create huge problems on shared
    – install blocking resources in the header.
    – or simply a background video and some images

    Including this will be closer to what most of the businesses are experiencing

    Reply ↓
61. Alex June 13, 2016 at 7:26 PM

    Let’s get Liquidweb on for 2016.
    Thanks for the in depth analysis Kevin!

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorJune 13, 2016 at 11:15 PM

       They are already included for 2016. Testing is on-going at the moment. Probably wont publish til Augustish

       Reply ↓
62. Pothi Kalimuthu June 20, 2016 at 9:18 AM

    Interesting results and I could see your hard work behind it, Kevin. Thanks for making it. I can’t wait for this year’s results, especially after knowing that the tests are on-going.

    Reply ↓
63. Ashley Jones July 27, 2016 at 12:58 PM

    I have used bluehost earlier and it scores on ease of use. However, the CPU throttling is a disappointing factor that I noticed even for 800 uniques per day. Sometimes it’s because of other’s accounts on same server.

    Reply ↓
64. kosmiktechnologies August 27, 2016 at 8:41 AM

    Any thoughts on Liquid Web’s managed WP hosting plan? Looks like a newer service, so I guess that’s why it wasn’t part of this post?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorAugust 27, 2016 at 12:10 PM

       You are correct. 2016 version comes out next month and has LiquidWeb on it. Sign up for the newsletter or follow on facebook/twitter to see when it goes live.

       Reply ↓
65. Luke Lam September 1, 2016 at 7:29 PM

    Very thorough analysis, Kevin, and we’re most grateful for it. Any reason why a big player like WordPress VIP from Automattic is not included?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorSeptember 2, 2016 at 12:26 PM

       It’s going to be published in the 2016 version which comes out this month!

       Reply ↓
66. Tiger September 11, 2016 at 5:29 PM

    any places to do a test this yet?

    Reply ↓
    1. Kevin Ohashi Post authorSeptember 14, 2016 at 2:11 PM

       I don’t understand the question?

       Reply ↓

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