Tag Archives: reviews

LightningBase Review (2018)

LightningBase participated for the fourth time in a row in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. This year LightningBase entered in the <$25/month and $25-50/month price brackets.

LightningBase has consistently earned Top Tier status in every year they've participated. This year was no exception.

The Products

Plan Name	Plan Monthly Price	Plan Visitors Allowed	Plan Memory/RAM	Plan Disk Space	Plan Bandwidth	Plan Sites Allowed
Personal	$9.95	10,000 (Guideline*)	3 GB	1 GB	10 GB	1
Medium	$49.95	100,000 (Guideline*)	6 GB	15 GB	100 GB	10

Guideline based on the resources provided, although if most are cached and the site is efficient this may be exceeded dramatically, as we don't artificially limit pageviews.

Performance Review

Load Storm

Plan	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)
<$25	449,766	93	365.18	249.87	15,096	419	25.38	21.35	14.1
$25-50	455,551	16	360.55	253.08	15,099	401	25.72	21.06	14.29

Sources: https://pro.loadstorm.com/#!test/562070, https://pro.loadstorm.com/#!test/562159

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

In both tests there were minimal errors and the average response time was stable at just over 400ms. The tests at these price tiers are identical, so it's logical that the more expensive plan slightly outperformed the cheaper one.

Load Impact

	Requests	Errors	Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Average Load Time (Seconds)	Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)	Peak Average Requests/Sec
<$25	339672	0	18.26	0.412	300.6	682
$25-50	338834	0	18.19	0.398	302	688

Source: <25, 25-50

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

LightningBase had perfect results on the Load Impact test, zero errors and no noticeable impact on response times.

Uptime

Uptime Robot and StatusCake both showed 100% uptime across the board for LightningBase.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

PHP Bench	WP Bench
8.678	1388.888889
8.726	1288.659794

The WPPerformanceTester results were quite fast. The WP bench scores were very fast (the second fastest in both price tiers).

	<25 Load Time	25-50 Load Time
Dulles	0.429	0.429
Denver	1.212	1.118
LA	0.843	0.797
London	1.169	1.173
Frankfurt	1.091	1.186
Rose Hill, Mauritius	2.435	2.436
Singapore	1.863	1.728
Mumbai	2.33	2.098
Japan	1.292	1.304
Sydney	1.762	1.771
Brazil	1.511	1.479

Nothing much to say about the WebPageTest results. They were decidedly normal which is what most people need unless you're targeting a specific geographic region.

Conclusion

LightningBase. Another year, another set of near perfect runs. 100% uptime. Great load tests. This is the 4th year in a row LightningBase has earned top tier recognition. It seems almost expected at this point. I'm still puzzled how they are still flying so far under the radar.

HostingAdvice.com Steals Review Signal’s Content and Uses it to Mislead Visitors

This was originally written on July 7, 2015. The screenshots are mostly from that period using archive.org. The site has changed (no longer has a Top 10 that I see, but still misuses Review Signal in the exact same way). I was hesitant to bash competitors, but I decided I don't care, they are the ones behaving badly, I will call them out on it.

This is Episode 2 of Dirty Slimy Shady Secrets of the Web Hosting Review World

I've long hated the fake review sites that plague the web hosting review business. But it just became even more personal. HostingAdvice.com decided to take reviews from Review Signal, edit them and selectively use them to promote companies with very poor ratings.

Let's take a look at what is happening at HostingAdvice.com (This links to archive of their site in case they change it and I don't want them getting any benefit for the BS they are pulling).

They claim to be an expert and say everyone sucks. They are calling everyone else spammy and unreliable. It's hard to argue with the sentiment considering I have the same stance here.

But let's take a look at their Top Hosts in 2015

Media Temple as number one, not the most abusive ranking I've seen. They don't have the best reviews here, but they are 58% (56% as of Jan 2017), which is 2nd tierish, at least more than half their customers are saying good things. BlueHost is #2? That's just nonsense. They have a 47% (40% as of Jan 2017) which means less than half their users are saying good things about them.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Remember that Highfalutin rhetoric about them being different and not spammy/unreliable? How could you possible need a disclosure like that if it were true? That's right, you're just like every other crap web hosting review site out there trying to pimp the highest paying affiliate program on unsuspecting visitors.

If that wasn't enough, there's always the coup de grâce:

Things are starting to make sense. But none of this has gotten personal yet.

So I took a look at the #3 Ranked iPage and to my absolute delight found this under 'Customer Reviews'

Yes, those are the two highest rated positive comments about iPage on Review Signal.

Except they've been given 5 stars which isn't something we do here. Also, they've edited this review without indicating they changed it (adding 'I'), which tells me they did this by hand and not scraping.

So that five star rating is made up. How made up?

So made up that this stolen review was given four stars. They are simply adding their own narrative and judgement to Review Signal's data.

At Review Signal, we only categorize as positive or negative.

Why does this matter and why is this so personal?

This matters because they were conscious enough of Review Signal to steal its content. They were also conscious enough to cherry pick the data they wanted to push the highest paying affiliates and ignored the fact they are selling out to some of the lowest rated companies around. They have JustHost listed as #9 (like many Fake review sites have in their top lists) when every indication shows that they have a terrible reputation. One of the absolute lowest on this site at 39% ( 31% as of Jan 2017) or you can look at the 21% on a no-affiliate link site that uses a similar methodology to Review Signal (now down to 7% as of Jan 2017).

2017 Update: iPage is still listed as 5 Stars with a 4.9/5 Rating as one of their best hosts in 2017.

Finally, what made this so personal is they are using the Review Signal brand to mislead consumers. This site was built to help consumers in a space filled with charlatans and it is painful to watch the brand be used by one of them to enhance their bottom line.

If you're not familiar with Review Signal, I suggest start by looking at our full dataset. Alternatively, you can read about how it works where our entire methodology is detailed including the algorithms used to generate our ratings. The gist of it is we use twitter data to listen to what good and bad things are saying about web hosting companies and publish the results. We validate our method using the few limited available metrics like NPS scores when given the opportunity.

LightningBase WordPress Hosting Review (2016)

LightningBase participated for the third year in a row in WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. They had three plans entered into the following ranges: <$25/month, $25-50/m, and $51-100/month.

LightningBase is one of the most unspoken about companies in the space and I really don't know why. In the past two previous years of testing they earned top tier WordPress hosting performance awards. This year was no exception.

Products

Company / Price Bracket	Plan	Monthly Price	Visitors Allowed	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Sites Allowed
LightningBase <25	Personal	$9.95	Unlimited. 10,000 suggested	1 GB	10 GB	1
LightningBase 25-50	Medium	$49.95	Unlimited	15 GB	100 GB	10
LightningBase 51-100	Large	$99.95	Unlimited	30 GB	250 GB	25

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)
LightningBase <25	314439	5	238.68	174.69	8989	255	16.24	13.24	9.023
LightningBase 25-50	315348	1	238.4	175.19	3567	272	16.34	13.47	9.077
LightningBase 51-100	456430	0	356.3	253.57	3909	261	23.65	19.41	13.14

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. LightningBase put on an absolute clinic here. No requests hitting the timeout (15,000ms), keeping a very quick average response time in the 200ms range and virtually no errors across all the plans including an actual zero in the largest test.

Blitz Results

Company / Price Bracket	Hits	Errors	Timeouts	Average Hits/Second	Average Response Time	Fastest Response	Slowest Response
LightningBase <25	27488	0	0	458	71	71	72
LightningBase 25-50	27460	0	0	458	72	71	72
LightningBase 51-100	54946	0	0	916	71	71	73

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. LightningBase had zero errors. Response times are nearly identical across every plan with a total of 3ms spread between all three plans.