Pressable WordPress Hosting Review (2016)

Pressable participated for the second time in WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. Their last participation was in the original which was performed in 2013. They've undergone major changes since then and are now owned by Automattic. This year they had the most plans entered of any company at five into the following ranges: $25-50/month, $51-100/month, $101-200/m, $201-500/month and Enterprise ($500+/month).

Products

Company / Price Bracket	Plan	Monthly Price	Visitors Allowed	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Sites Allowed
Pressable 25-50	5 Sites	$25	60,000	Unlimited	Unlimited	5
Pressable 51-100	20 Sites	$90	400,000	Unlimited	Unlimited	20
Pressable 101-200	Agency 1	$135	600,000	Unlimited	Unlimited	30
Pressable 201-500	Agency 3	$225	1 Million	Unlimited	Unlimited	50
Pressable Enterprise	VIP 1	$750	5 Million	Unlimited	Unlimited	100

They made it clear to me that the products are identical until the VIP level, each site has equal resources, the only difference in plans is that more sites are allowed.

View Full Product Details

Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Company / Price Bracket	Total Requests	Total Errors	Peak RPS	Average RPS	Peak Response Time(ms)	Average Response Time(ms)	Total Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Throughput (MB/s)	Average Throughput (MB/s)
Pressable 25-50	394405	26	294.6	219.11	15101	226	16.4	13.32	9.111
Pressable 51-100	569095	0	441.43	316.16	3152	239	24.35	20.19	13.53
Pressable 101-200	724499	1090	562.12	402.5	15024	447	30.91	26.07	17.17
Pressable 201-500	896616	12256	740.88	498.12	6362	450	37.87	33.8	21.04
Pressable Enterprise	1538237	7255	1162.63	854.58	15099	733	29.18	21.95	16.21

LoadStorm test logged in thousands of users to simulate heavy uncached load on the server, scaling up with more users on larger plans after the $25-50/month range. Pressable overall did very well. Earning top tier status in four our of five. The 201-500 price bracket had a bit of difficulty with the increased load which disappears at the Enterprise level.

Blitz Results

Company / Price Bracket	Hits	Errors	Timeouts	Average Hits/Second	Average Response Time	Fastest Response	Slowest Response
Pressable 25-50	25914	0	2	432	134	134	136
Pressable 51-100	51781	0	0	863	135	134	136
Pressable 101-200	77652	0	4	1294	134	141	133
Pressable 201-500	77850	11	1	1298	132	131	135
Pressable Enterprise	129866	13	2	2164	132	131	139

The Blitz test is designed to make sure that static assets (which should be served from cache) are being handled properly and can scale to very heavy big spikes in traffic. If the LoadStorm test was a clinic, this was absolute perfection. Pressable had zero issues with the Blitz tests across every plan. Their caching is certainly up to snuff.

Uptime

Company	StatusCake	UptimeRobot
Pressable 25-50	99.91	99.92
Pressable 51-100	99.93	99.95
Pressable 101-200	99.96	99.94
Pressable 201-500	99.88	99.9

Oddly enough, Uptime was one of the biggest struggles for Pressable. The 201-500 plan didn't earn top tier status because it fell below the 99.9% threshold averaging 99.89 between the two monitors. The rest were closer to the 99.9% mark than the 100% mark which, while above the expected threshold, I'd like to see a bit of improvement in.

Uptime wasn't tracked on most Enterprise level plans because they are just so expensive that it felt wasteful to run them for a long period doing nothing but monitoring uptime if the company had other plans in the testing which could also be measured.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

I mention these because they are in the full testing but I won't bother putting them here. No company had any significant issue with either and it's not worth writing about. If you're very interested in seeing the geographical response times on WPT or what the raw computing power test of WPPerformanceTester measured, read the full results.

Conclusion

Pressable managed to earn four Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performances out of five plans. Overall, the performance is excellent and they can scale from $25/month to Enterprise size workloads. I'd like to see some minor improvements in uptime, but apart from that small issue, they don't have much else to improve on. It's great to see a strong competitor at virtually every price level in the space.