$101-200/Month WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018)

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 $101-200/month price bracket for WordPress Hosting.

Hosting Plan Details

Click the table below to see the full product specifications sheet.

Load Storm Testing Results

This test scaled from 500 to 4000 users over 30 minutes with 10 minutes at the peak.

Results Table

Discussion

Kinsta handled this test without issue. Pressable had the same Tokyo issue but otherwise was just fine.

LiquidWeb [Reviews], Nestify and Nexcess had increased response times then errors.

Disclaimer: Liquid Web was the only website with SSL enabled which penalized their results versus their peers.

Load Impact Testing Results

This test scaled from 1 to 3000 users over 15 minutes. Error count capped at 5,000.

Results Table

Discussion

Kinsta and Pressable handled this test without issue.

LiquidWeb [Reviews], Nestify and Nexcess struggled with this test showing signs of load which resulted in errors and increased response times.

Disclaimer: Liquid Web was the only website with SSL enabled which penalized their results versus their peers.

Uptime Monitoring Results

Results Table

Discussion

All companies did well on the uptime monitoring.

WebPageTest.org Results

Results Table

Discussion

There isn't a whole lot to say since this is a non-impacting metric in terms of the results. Nobody had huge issues.

I looked at the aggregate change again for the locations which were similar. There were 8 companies last year in this price bracket and only five this year. Across the nine same locations used, there was a cumulative decrease in response time of 2.68 seconds. For instance, Dulles dropped from 1.10 to 0.42 seconds on average.

WPPerformanceTester Results

Results Table

Discussion

Kinsta had the fastest PHP bench and Liquid Web had the fastest WP bench.

The average PHP bench went from 10.75 to 11.07 from the 2016 benchmarks in this price tier. The average WP bench went from 702 to 664. The PHP and WP bench both dropped in this price tier.

One thing to note is that WP bench scores can vary tremendously based on the database architecture. You'll often see faster scores on architectures running the database locally compared to ones that run separately or have redundancy built in.

Conclusion

Top Tier

Kinsta and Pressable both earned Top Tier status this year for going through all the tests without any significant issues.

Honorable Mention

None.

Individual Host Analysis

Kinsta

Yet another Top Tier performance from Kinsta. Perfect uptime and near perfect load tests. It's starting to feel redundant writing that.

Liquid Web

LiquidWeb [Reviews] was at a huge disadvantage by keeping SSL enabled which substantially reduces performance in my experience. I offered to let them turn it off since no other competitors at this price tier were running it. They declined saying they do HTTPS on all the sites and would be tested as such. They kept perfect uptime but struggled with the load tests which SSL would play a a part. I'm sad to see them lose their Top Tier status they earned last year but I really respect their decision to keep SSL on knowing it wouldn't look as good on these tests because all clients get SSL.

Nestify

Nestify continues to be hampered by the 100 Mbps limit which hurt their Load Impact results. Their uptime was good. Load Storm left room to be desired.

Nexcess

Nexcess kept good uptime but the load tests again caused issues. I know they were working on lots of upgrades to deploy customer wide based on these results and look forward to seeing the results of the improvements next year. I don't think any company has been as open and transparent about discussing their infrastructure and less than stellar results. I have a lot of respect for that type of openness.

Pressable

Pressable continued to have the weird Tokyo datacenter quirk for Load Storm. But beyond that the performance was near perfect. Another Top Tier performance.

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Kevin Ohashi

Founder at Review Signal

Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.

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