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Under $25/Month WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2016)

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Sponsored by LoadStorm. The easy and cost effective load testing tool for web and mobile applications.

The full company list, product list, methodology, and notes can be found here

This post focuses only on the results of the testing in the <$25/month price bracket for WordPress Hosting.

 

<$25/Month WordPress Hosting Products

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<$25/Month WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks Results

1. Load Storm

Test 500-2000 Concurrent Users over 30 Minutes, 10 Minutes at Peak

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)
A2 310069 203981 249.08 172.26 15138 549 4.639 8.853 2.577
BlueHost 181995 153234 147.47 101.11 16000 7634 1.066 3.677 0.592
DreamHost 295685 43 224.1 164.27 15063 339 16.06 13.5 8.922
FlyWheel 265618 81491 205.22 147.57 15101 1154 11.5 9.361 6.391
GoDaddy 311172 1363 238.68 172.87 10100 340 16.07 13.31 8.927
Hosting Agency (DE) 182424 117939 132.65 101.35 15991 6743 3.823 10.53 2.124
IWW 272657 84 217.92 151.48 10096 266 14.93 13.77 8.293
LightningBase 314439 5 238.68 174.69 8989 255 16.24 13.24 9.023
Media Temple 327662 1466 258.45 182.03 10628 381 12.55 10.54 6.972
Pressed 289318 61 214.05 160.73 15029 266 16.25 13.01 9.03
SiteGround 301722 1 230.45 167.62 9374 447 15.9 13.76 8.833
TrafficPlanetHosting 289335 476 217.63 160.74 15216 570 16.15 14.08 8.974
WP Land 293166 11596 228.4 162.87 15608 644 15.47 13.3 8.594

Discussion of Load Storm Test Results

The companies that clearly didn't struggle at all with LoadStorm were DreamHost [Reviews], Incendia Web Works (IWW), LightningBase, Pressed, SiteGround [Reviews]. GoDaddy [Reviews], MediaTemple [Reviews] and Traffic Planet Hosting had minor spikes at the start, but they seem nearly inconsequential in the grand scheme of the test.

WP.land seemed to have some security measures which struggled with wp-login being hit so frequently.

A2 Hosting [Reviews], BlueHost [Reviews], FlyWheel [Reviews] and Hosting Agency did not do well on this test. FlyWheel explicitly stated this was too much load for that size plan and recommended upgrading if this was the expected load.

2. Blitz.io

Test 1-1000 Concurrent Users over 60 seconds

Blitz Test Quick Results Table

Company Hits Errors Timeouts Average Hits/Second Average Response Time Fastest Response Slowest Response
A2 590 27255 390 10 92 55 167
BlueHost 23340 71 274 389 214 155 604
DreamHost 29337 0 1 489 4 3 7
FlyWheel 28530 0 0 476 28 21 146
GoDaddy 15222 11093 28 254 196 190 229
Hosting Agency (DE) 662 20862 3649 11 630 400 1556
IWW 28786 9 0 480 23 21 24
LightningBase 27488 0 0 458 71 71 72
Media Temple 15255 11260 5 254 200 188 318
Pressed 26228 0 0 437 80 5 389
SiteGround 26055 1 21 434 100 72 346
TrafficPlanetHosting 1018 8344 9718 17 266 102 843
WP Land 28344 0 0 472 39 38 39

Discussion of Blitz Test 1 Results

This test is just testing whether the company is caching the front page and how well whatever caching system they have setup is performing (generally this hits something like Varnish or Nginx).

Who performed without any major issues?

DreamHost, IWW, LightningBase, SiteGround, WP Land all handled the test without any issues.

Who had some minor issues?

BlueHost had a couple spikes during the test which caused some errors and timeouts, but they weren't substantial.

FlyWheel had a spike at the very end of the test which caused a large increase in response times.

Pressed started to have a ramp up in response times but it never errored or timed out during the test.

Who had some major issues?

GoDaddy, MediaTemple and TrafficPlanetHosting seemed to pretty clearly hit security measures which couldn't be worked around. The response times were relatively stable, but errors shot up which is symptomatic of a security measure kicking in rather than the server being taxed. It's hard to know how they would have performed sans security measures.

A2 and Hosting Agency did not take kindly to the Blitz test and crashed almost immediately under load.

3. Uptime Monitoring

Both uptime monitoring solutions were third party providers that offer free services. UptimeRobot was paid for and monitoring on a 1 minute interval. All the companies were monitored over approximately two months (May-June 2016).

Uptime Robot & StatusCake

Company StatusCake UptimeRobot
A2 99.92 99.91
BlueHost 30.22 18.06
DreamHost 99.97 99.97
FlyWheel 99.96 99.98
GoDaddy 99.96 99.98
Hosting Agency (DE) - 100
IWW 99.73 99.88
LightningBase 99.99 100
Media Temple 99.96 99.95
Pressed 100 99.87
SiteGround 99.97 99.98
TrafficPlanetHosting 99.98 99.98
WP Land 99.92 100

BlueHost screwed up and cancelled this account mid-testing causing the uptime to look horrific. Their other two plans which were not cancelled had measurements of 99.98, 99.98, 100 and 99.99 uptime. I'm upset that it happened and there was a struggle to restore the account and have to take credit away for this type of screw up. But, they were able to keep the other servers up with near perfect uptime which I think should be stated here as well.

Hosting Agency for some reason couldn't be monitored by StatusCake (http/2 issue they still haven't fixed for nearly 9 months, which UptimeRobot fixed within 24 hours when I notified them). But they had 100% on UptimeRobot, so it looks good.

IWW had a bunch of short outages and one longer one (2hr 33m) which brought it's uptime down.

Pressed had a 1hr 51m downtime (502 error) recorded by UptimeRobot but StatusCake never picked it up. I'm not sure what to make of that, it might be something wrong with UptimeRobot's servers connecting properly since StatusCake never picked it up over an interval that long.

Everyone else had above 99.9% uptime.

4. WebPageTest.org

Every test was run with the settings: Chrome Browser, 9 Runs, native connection (no traffic shaping), first view only.

Company WPT Dulles WPT Denver WPT LA WPT London WPT Frankfurt WPT South Africa
A2 0.819 0.638 1.109 1.181 1.687 5.054
BlueHost 0.902 0.521 0.878 1.532 1.874 3.483
DreamHost 0.769 0.777 1.444 1.107 1.64 4.33
FlyWheel 0.74 0.722 1.077 1.082 1.649 5.241
GoDaddy 0.939 0.728 0.834 1.376 1.992 6.909
Hosting Agency (DE) 1.299 1.258 2.17 0.985 1.55 4.905
IWW 0.544 0.658 0.864 0.929 1.416 4.105
LightningBase 0.62 0.598 1.078 0.95 1.471 5.764
Media Temple 0.86 0.667 0.811 1.313 1.945 4.645
Pressed 0.773 0.902 1.276 1.176 1.691 4.845
SiteGround 0.741 0.64 1.048 1.06 1.721 4.94
TrafficPlanetHosting 0.793 0.562 1.26 1.212 1.723 3.522
WP Land 0.719 0.689 1.154 1.099 1.709 4.8

 

Company WPT Singapore WPT Shanghai WPT Japan WPT Sydney WPT Brazil
A2 2.244 22.287 1.974 2.003 1.895
BlueHost 2.255 22.728 1.809 1.467 2.274
DreamHost 1.93 22.186 2.028 1.954 1.747
FlyWheel 1.765 12.549 1.845 1.816 1.758
GoDaddy 2.173 22.373 1.826 1.959 2.103
Hosting Agency (DE) 2.311 22.406 2.651 2.772 2.596
IWW 1.98 22.547 1.615 1.96 1.535
LightningBase 1.999 19.731 1.708 1.913 1.661
Media Temple 2.113 22.141 1.802 1.959 2.135
Pressed 2.233 23.691 1.997 2.037 1.894
SiteGround 2.131 22.718 1.843 2.079 1.788
TrafficPlanetHosting 2.081 22.74 1.872 1.595 1.816
WP Land 2.25 22.305 1.852 1.959 1.752

What I learned was getting traffic into China is terrible. Nobody really did well on the Shanghai location. South Africa is also really slow. Most servers were US based but were delivering content to most corners of the world in about 2 seconds or less which is impressive. Hosting Agency based in Germany was a bit disappointing. Very slow relatively speaking to the US. But it wasn't even the fastest to London or Frankfurt. LightningBase and IWW were able to beat the German company in the US by a large margin and to Europe which reinforces that geographic location isn't everything in terms of speed.

I wish I could compare averages against last year except they removed one of the testing locations (Miami) and I did a global test instead because that was something people wanted to see.

5. WPPerformanceTester

Company PHP Bench [Seconds] (lower=faster) WP Bench [Queries Per Second](higher=faster)
A2 12.626 570.78
BlueHost 13.089 1083.42
DreamHost 17.104 446.23
FlyWheel 11.761 387.3
GoDaddy 13.804 278.47
Hosting Agency (DE) 6.501 45.28
IWW 7.637 1869.16
LightningBase 10 1315.79
Media Temple 12.241 339.79
Pressed 11.036 217.2
SiteGround 11.497 733.14
TrafficPlanetHosting 8.666 918.27
WP Land 14.485 684.93

What was enormously interesting about WPPerformanceTester results this year was the much larger spread and faster results. Last year, almost everyone was around 10-14 seconds for PHP Bench with the outlier of PressLabs doing 8.9 and DreamHost at 27. DreamHost again has the dubious honor of the slowest PHP Bench but it improved by a whopping 10 seconds down to 17. The fastest was Hosting Agency with 6.5, more than a full 2 seconds faster than last year's fastest speed. IWW, TrafficPlanetHosting also managed sub 10 second speeds.

Last year's fastest WP Bench was 889 queries per second. That was blown away by this years testing with IWW leading the group at more than double the speed (1869). BlueHost, LightningBase and TrafficPlanetHosting all managed to be faster than last year's fastest benchmark as well. Unfortunately, Hosting Agency's incredibly fast PHP bench is somewhat cancelled out by their slowest WP Bench score, which is slower than last year's slowest. It should be noted that transaction speed isn't always a great measured on distributed/clustered/cloud systems that may be running databases on different machines, but at the entry level that's less of an issue. Generally the incredibly fast scores you see are local databases with no network latency overhead.

Conclusion

It is nice to get back to a real entry level analysis with a much more level playing field. Having 13 different companies available to choose from in the <$25/month range is fantastic. Despite the change in this years format, the lower end plans still outperformed the fastest competitors from last year's tests which had plans up to ~$300/month.

Despite the hard price cap in this bracket of testing, there were still some companies that handled all the tests without any serious issue. Many more did very well but ran into minor issues.

The amount of companies jumping into the space is a fantastic win for consumers. In this tier we saw A2, Pressed, WP Land, Hosting Agency, IWW and Traffic Planet Hosting all enter for the first time. They target a variety of different niches within the space and overall it's a win for us, the consumer to have more good choices and options. From a performance standpoint, you can still get amazing performance value for the money even at the lowest tier.

Without further ado, I will tell you who had the best performance, who deserved an honorable mention and then analyze each host individually. I still don't believe in ranking in any particular order, only grouping companies by how well they performed.

Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance

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DreamHost [Reviews], LightningBase, and  SiteGround [Reviews],

All three of these companies went through the full testing without any meaningful issues.

Honorable Mentions

Pressed had an odd uptime issue but also showed some signs of server stress during the blitz test. For a brand new company they performed admirably, but I'm not quite comfortable awarding them the top tier status quite yet when you compare their results against the three top tier companies, but they put on a very good showing.

WP.land did well in every test except LoadStorm where it had a roughly 4% error rate. It looked like a security issue with wp-login which isn't uncommon. But there were also some spikes/delays as well. It could just be security acting up, but again, a minor issue that kept it out of the top tier, but it was worthy of an honorable mention from yet another new comer to this year's testing.

GoDaddy [Reviews]/MediaTemple [Reviews], I combine this one because it's running on the same tech and the results look very similar and experienced the same security issues. You can pretty clearly see when the security measures kick in on Blitz and I wasn't able to work with their tech team to come up with a way to responsibly bypass their security measures. LoadStorm had a spike at the start with wp-login issues but resolved itself out quickly and had a flat response time graph. It's possible their tech is just as good as the top tier hosts, but I wasn't able to accurately measure it because of security measures but it looks very good and at least deserves the honorable mention.

Traffic Planet Hosting is another new entrant and had similar issues to GoDaddy/MediaTemple. Security issues caused some problems on the Blitz test, but it did start to show some load too. Not perfect, but it did well on LoadStorm as well.  (no honorable mention?)

Individual Host Analysis

A2 Hosting [Reviews]

A2 Hosting was a new entrant to this test and as much as I love the competition in the space, A2 fell short. Other than their uptime monitoring which was good, they struggled in all the load testing experiments.

BlueHost [Reviews]

BlueHost specifically messed up with my account in this test and the uptime was terrible because of it. That alone ruined the uptime test, although as I stated in the section, the other servers all maintained excellent uptime which were on different accounts. They did ok in the blitz test, but not in the LoadStorm test. They also surprisingly managed the fastest individual WebPageTest score of any host in this price range. Compared to last year I don't see any huge signs of improvement with regards to performance.

DreamHost [Reviews]

Last year DreamHost's DreamPress product almost made the top tier except for some major downtime issues. This year, they had no such downtime issues and the performance remained top notch. DreamHost earned the top tier status for the <$25/month price bracket. It appears to be an excellent product priced very competitively.

FlyWheel [Reviews]

FlyWheel only entered one product this year and it was less powerful than last year's. It struggled a bit more on the LoadStorm test but the Blitz was perfect (although for this price tier, it was a weaker test than last year's test). They explicitly stated for LoadStorm that the plan was inappropriate for that level of traffic. They can probably handle bigger sites, but if we're comparing dollars to performance, they fell short in this price bracket on that metric. But they are still rated as the most well liked company that we track at Review Signal, so they are clearly doing something right in terms of product and customer service.

GoDaddy [Reviews]

GoDaddy had a stalwart performance marred by what appeared to be security measures. They very well could have a top notch product but we couldn't work out a responsible way to bypass the security measures for the Blitz load test. LoadStorm looked pretty good, one small spike to start and steady up to 2000 users. GoDaddy earned an honorable mention status because the product didn't seem to encounter any non-artificial problems.

Incendia Web Works

IWW did a great job in both load tests. The only concern was uptime, where IWW had 99.73% and 99.88% as recorded by each service. The performance component is definitely there, but a little more consistency and we have another serious competitor in the space. The only reason they didn't earn honorable mention while Pressed did is that there were conflicting uptime reports for Pressed where one showed 100% and the other recorded sub 99.9% uptime. Two independent services showed IWW below 99.9%, so there isn't much doubt about it in my mind. Like DreamHost last year, they put on a great performance showing and I hope next year the servers are a bit more stable and I can award top tier status.

LightningBase

LightningBase continues to impress. The last two years they've put on consistently near perfect tests. Their Blitz result was perfect and their LoadStorm had only 5 errors out of 314439 requests. Combined with 100/99.99% uptime monitors, LightningBase is unquestionably in the top tier for the <$25/month WordPress hosting bracket.

MediaTemple [Reviews]

MediaTemple's results basically mirrored GoDaddy's results. It would be even hard to tell the graphs apart if you removed the names. The MediaTemple/GoDaddy platform appears to be very solid but we couldn't responsibly get by some security measures, so I couldn't award it top tier status, but MT earned an honorable mention.

Pressed

Pressed earned itself an honorable mention. It had a weird uptime issue but more importantly it started to show some signs of load during the Blitz test where I would expect a flat response time from a static cache test like Blitz. It's a very new product and I'm sure we'll continue to see tremendous improvements as time goes on, a very good performance from possibly the newest company in this year's testing.

Hosting Agency

Hosting Agency performed as expected, it appears to have no special WordPress optimizations. If you were to install a basic lamp stack, this is the performance I expect out of the box. They had perfect uptime and oddly found themselves on both ends of the spectrum on my WPPerformanceTester. They weren't faster to England or Germany on WebPageTest, which I suspect is because there was no special caching technologies to accelerate delivery of pages despite being geographically closer. And it just collapsed during the load tests, especially Blitz which is essentially a static cache test (where they have none). Another important note is that their entire system is in German only.

SiteGround [Reviews]

SiteGround got even better this year. They jumped up from honorable mention to top tier status. Their Blitz and LoadStorm tests both improved while everything else remained at a high level. An all around fantastic performance which deserved top tier status.

Traffic Planet Hosting

Another new comer to this years testing. TPH put on a good show, there seemed to be some security measures which ruined the Blitz testing, but the LoadStorm test looked very solid. They earned an honorable mention because the only issue seemed artificial. I'm less confident about the quality of the product than GoDaddy/MediaTemple, but it still seemed to warrant recognition.

WP.land

WPLand was the final new entrant and they put on a fantastic showing. Everything went near perfect except the LoadStorm test which seemed to have an issue with wp-login triggering some security measures. But the response rate was pretty stable and quick despite the ramp up to 2000 users. They also had a perfect blitz test with no errors and a 1ms spread in fastest to slowest response times. WP Land earned honorable mention status because overall it was a very good performance with a small issue that might be security related.

 

WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2016)

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Sponsored by LoadStorm. The easy and cost effective load testing tool for web and mobile applications.

2018 WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks is now live.

This is the fourth round of managed WordPress web hosting performance testing. You can see the original, 2014 version , and 2015 version.

Companies Tested

A2 Hosting [Reviews]
BlueHost [Reviews]
CloudWays [Reviews]
Conetix
DreamHost [Reviews]
FlyWheel [Reviews]
GoDaddy [Reviews]
Incendia Web Works
Kinsta
LightningBase
LiquidWeb [Reviews]
MediaTemple [Reviews]
Pagely [Reviews]
Pantheon [Reviews]
Pressable (Formerly ZippyKid)
Pressed.net
Pressidium
Pressjitsu
PressLabs
Hosting Agency (German)
SiteGround [Reviews]
Traffic Planet Hosting
WordPress.com VIP
WPEngine [Reviews]
WP.land
WPOven.com

Companies that didn't participate this round but did on previous rounds: WebHostingBuzzWPProntoNexcessA Small Orange [Reviews] and  WebSynthesis [Reviews].

Every plan was donated by the company for testing purposes with the strict stipulation that it would be the same as if any normal user signed up. There is a notes section at the bottom that details the minutiae of changes made to plans at the end of this post. Nearly every single company had security issues that I had to get around, so they worked to make sure my testing went through properly. Load testing often looks like an attack and it's the only way I can do these tests.

The Products

This year is a bit different than years past where every company and plan competed against one another. When I started the price gap was from $5/month to $29/month. Last year the gap was $5.95 to $299. I was only testing entry level plans but the market has dramatically changed since I first got started. Today, there is demand at many different price points and lots of companies have gone upscale with WordPress.com VIP at the top of the price bracket starting at $5,000/month. The only logical way to break things up was by price brackets. So below you will see the brackets and which companies participated. Specific details will be included on each bracket's write up.

 

<$25/m $25-50/m $51-100/m $101-200/m $201-500/m $500+/m
A2 Hosting A2 Hosting LiquidWeb A2 Hosting Kinsta Kinsta
Bluehost Conetix Bluehost Bluehost Media Temple Pagely
DreamHost LLC Lightning Base Cloudways (AWS ) Conetix Pagley Pantheon
Flywheel Pantheon Cloudways (Google) Kinsta Pantheon Pressable
GoDaddy Pressable Kinsta Liquid Web Pressable Pressidium
Incendia Web Works Pressjitsu Lightning Base Pressable Pressidium WordPress.com VIP
Lightning Base SiteGround Media Temple Pressidium Presslabs WP Engine
Media Temple WP Engine Pagely Pressjitsu SiteGround
Pressed WP.land Pantheon
Hosting Agency.de Cloudways (DigitalOcean) Pressable
SiteGround Cloudways (Vultr) Pressidium
Traffic Planet Hosting WPOven SiteGround
WP.land

 

Methodology

The question I tried to answer is how well do these WordPress hosting services perform? I tested each company on two distinct measures of performance: peak performance and consistency. I've also included a compute and database benchmark based on a WordPress plugin.

All tests were performed on an identical WordPress dummy website with the same plugins except in cases where hosts added extra plugins. Each site was monitored for approximately two months for consistency.

1. LoadStorm

LoadStorm was kind enough to give me resources to perform load testing on their platform and multiple staff members were involved in designing and testing these WordPress hosts. I created identical scripts for each host to load a site, login to the site and browse the site. Logged in users were designed to break some of the caching and better simulate real user load. The amount of users varies by cost.

2. Blitz.io

I used Blitz again to compare against previous results. This tests the static caching of the homepage. I increased the number of users based on monthly cost this time.

3. Uptime (UptimeRobot and StatusCake)

Consistency matters. I wanted to see how well these companies performed over a longer period of time. I used two separate uptime monitoring services over the course of a month to test consistency.

4. WebPageTest.org

WebPageTest with 9 runs, first view only, native connection. I tested from Dulles, Denver, Los Angeles, London, Frankfurt, South Africa, Singapore, Shanghai, Japan, Sydney, Brazil.

5. WPPerformanceTester (free plugin on WordPress.org)

I created a WordPress plugin to benchmark CPU, MySql and WordPress DB performance. The CPU/MySql benchmarks are testing the compute power. The WordPress component tests actually calling $wpdb and executing insert, select, update and delete queries.

 

Notes - Changes made to Hosting Plans

A2 - VPS Servers can't install WordPress out of the box without extra payment for Softaculous. Disabled recaptcha.

Conetix - disabled WordFence and Stream plugins.

SiteGround - fully enable SuperCacher plugin

GoDaddy - 24 database connection limit increased if you notify them of heavy load

CloudWays - disabled WordFence