WordPress.com VIP Hosting Review (2016)

WordPress.com VIP participated for the first time in WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. They were easily the most expensive service tested, clocking in at $5,000/month. They also host some of the most popular WordPress sites on the web and being Automattic's flagship hosting product, it has some huge expectations riding on it.

Products

Company	Plan	Monthly Price	Visitors Allowed	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Sites Allowed
WordPress.com VIP	Basic	$5,000	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	5

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Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Company	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)
WordPress.com VIP	4660190	8151	3726.38	2588.99	8186	101	197.82	158.29	109.9

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. WordPress.com VIP handled this test with minimal errors and never hitting the response timeout limit of 15000ms. In fact, it had the lowest average response time and and peak response time.

Blitz Results

Company	Hits	Errors	Timeouts	Average Hits/Second	Average Response Time	Fastest Response	Slowest Response
WordPress.com VIP	146200	0	73	2437	6	3	21

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. WordPress.com VIP had a 17ms spread and a mere 73 timeouts out of 146,2000 requests. Certainly, top tier.

Uptime

Company	StatusCake	UptimeRobot
WordPress.com VIP	100	100

Perfect.

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

WordPress.com VIP stepped into the Enterprise level of our testing and proved itself worthy and earned our Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance award. The huge expectations of being owned by the creator of WordPress, being one of the largest companies in the space and hosting some of the biggest brands in the world were met. The price for VIP is beyond what most site owners will ever likely spend, but for the few that can afford it, VIP's performance is certainly top notch.