WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2020

WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2020) – $101-200/Month

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

Load Storm Testing Results

Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.

 

Results Table

Company Name 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)
1&1 IONOS 524,757 41,655 (7.94%) 380 292 15,593 505.00 23.53 17 13
Cloudways 405,655 0 (0%) 282 225.36 13,206.00 2,012.00 21 14 12
Jelastic, Inc 900,234 1,030 (0.11%) 693 500 14,609 219.00 48.21 37 27
Nestify 692,645 1(0%) 540 385 15,054 523.00 42.65 34 24
Pantheon 794,976 132 (0.02%) 621 442 15,102.00 116.00 45 36 25
Pressable 809,307 0(0%) 587 450 12,354 970.00 41.58 30 23
Seravo 765,043 121,572 (15.89%) 531 425 5,029 641.00 34.33 23 19
Servebolt.com 926,739 1,038 (0.11%) 879 515 15,100 108.00 33.93 33 19
WPOven 728,369 94 (0.01%) 577 405 15,100.00 424.00 42 34 24

Full interactive results can be referenced here.

Discussion

Jelastic, Nestify, Pantheon [Reviews], Servebolt and WPOven all handled the Load Storm test without issue.

1&1 IONOS [Reviews] may have run into some security issues which couldn't be turned off with a stable response time but high error rate.

Cloudways [Reviews] slowed down substantially with average response time going over 2000ms.

Pressable started to slow down with average response times rising from 500ms to 1100ms.

Seravo ran into an issue with docker proxy that couldn't be resolved which caused a high error rate.

Load Impact Testing Results

Load Impact is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.

Results Table

Company Name Requests Errors Data Transferred (GB) Peak Average Load Time (ms) Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps) Peak Average Requests/Sec
1&1 IONOS 796414 5000+ 3.45 1920 35.62 1640
Cloudways 578617 0 32.62 2790 378.37 820
Jelastic, Inc 1293290 9 69.97 193 1022 2260
Nestify 851045 0 47.54 1010 730.67 1560
Pantheon 1289653 1 74.76 59 1180 2480
Pressable 1337047 0 75.3 63 1590 3460
Seravo 881714 148 48.89 731 789.96 1750
Servebolt.com 1104070 5 61.12 236 913.11 1970
WPOven 895233 0 49.85 700 814.52 1740

Full interactive results can be referenced here.

Discussion

Jelastic, Pantheon, Pressable, Seravo, Servebolt and WPOven didn't experience any issues with the Load Impact test.

1&1 IONOS ran into security measures again and experienced a lot of errors.

Cloudways experienced some stress and response times increased substantially starting around 1200 users.

Nestify started experiencing load around 2500 and increased slightly to 1s average response time.

Uptime Monitoring Results

Uptime is monitored by two companies: Uptime Robot and StatusCake. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.

Results Table

Company Name UptimeRobot StatusCake StatusCake Avg Response Time Custom Uptime Monitor
1&1 IONOS 99.986 99.99 0.76
Cloudways 100 100 0.31
Jelastic, Inc 99.99 99.99 1.06
Nestify 100 100 0.45
Pantheon 100 100 0.11
Pressable 100 100 0.42
Seravo 100 100 0.41
Servebolt.com 99.582 99.99 0.28 99.99
WPOven 100 100 0.38

Discussion

Every company did well maintaining above 99.98% uptime. The only issue was a strange discrepancy between UptimeRobot and StatusCake on Servebolt's uptime. One showed a very low 99.582 and the other 99.99. The third monitor I setup showed 99.99%, so the issue appears to be with Uptime Robot.

WebPageTest.org Results

WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 11 different locations around the world.



Results Table

Results table can be referenced here. The radar chart does an excellent job without hiding any information.

Discussion

Pantheon picked up the fastest response times in 5/12 locations. Servebolt ended up being the fastest in only two locations but had the fastest average overall being near the fastest in most locaations. Nestify didn't stand out well here being slowest in 6/12 locales and second slowest in 5/12. Jelastic was the slowest in 5 locations, second slowest in 2 locations and the fastest in 3 locations.

WPPerformanceTester Results

WPPerformanceTester performs two benchmarks. One is a WordPress (WP Bench) and the other a PHP benchmark. WP Bench measures how many WP queries per second and higher tends to be better (varies considerably by architecture). PHP Bench performs a lot of computational and some database operations which are measured in seconds to complete. Lower PHP Bench is better. WP Bench is blue in the chart, PHP Bench is red.

Results Table

Company Name PHP Bench WP Bench
1&1 IONOS 10.029 370.5075954
Cloudways 7.605 628.1407035
Jelastic, Inc 7.888 1314.060447
Nestify 7.487 753.0120482
Pantheon 8.996 309.8853424
Pressable 6.213 1297.016861
Seravo 8.029 463.6068614
Servebolt.com 3.275 2049.180328
WPOven 11.831 497.2650423

Discussion

Servebolt blew away the competition on this test recording near 50% faster scores on both PHP bench and WP bench than the next fastest competitors. The competition wasn't slow either, Pressable's PHP bench was a near 50% improvement over their own score last year too.

Qualsys SSL Report Grade

The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

Results Table

Company Name Qualys SSL Report
1&1 IONOS B
Cloudways B
Jelastic, Inc A
Nestify B
Pantheon A
Pressable A
Seravo B
Servebolt.com B
WPOven B

Discussion

No company achieved an A+ rating. Every single B grade was for the following reason according to Qualsys: "This server supports TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. Grade capped to B."

Conclusion

Top Tier

Jelastic, Pantheon [Reviews], Servebolt and WPOven all earned Top Tier status this year. They didn't struggle at any point during this testing.

Honorable Mention

Nestify and Pressable earned Honorable Mentions because they had some minor slowdowns during Load Impact and Load Storm respectively.

Individual Host Analysis

1&1 IONOS [Reviews]

1&1 IONOS was marred by security measures that couldn't be worked around. Their uptime was solid, but the load tests just had too many errors which seemed like were triggered by security features because response times were remaining flat.

Cloudways [Reviews] (AWS Large)

Perfect uptime. Zero errors on load tests was nice. But the response times just increased too much to be win any recognition.

Jelastic

99.99% uptime on both monitors. Minimal errors on the load tests. Jelastic earned a top tier performance.

Nestify

Nestify's perfect uptime was a great start. 1 error total between both load tests. The only issue was the response times increased around 2500 users on Load Impact to over 1000ms which meant Nestify earned Honorable Mention status.

Pantheon [Reviews]

100% uptime. Effortless load test results including the fastest Load Impact average response time. Often the fastest response times on WebPageTest with the second fastest average load time overall. A solid showing earned Pantheon Top Tier status.

Pressable

Perfect uptime. Incredibly fast Load Impact results with zero errors and second fastest peak average load time. The only thing that kept Pressable from earning Top Tier status was Load Storm slowing down responses from 500ms to 1100ms during the test. Honorable Mention well earned.

Seravo

Perfect uptime. Solid Load Impact result. The downfall was a docker proxy bug which kept popping up and causing a lot of errors on Load Storm.

Servebolt

Servebolt prides themselves on speed. They were blazingly fast on WPPerformanceTester. They had the fastest average response time on WebPageTest. They had the fastest Load Storm average response time. Top Tier honors were easily awarded to Servebolt.

WPOven

A relatively unknown provider which intermittently participates in these benchmarks. Each time they seem to do quite well earning Top Tier honors for the third time in a row this year. Perfect uptime and excellent load tests will do that. Well done and welcome back WPOven.

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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.

2 thoughts on “WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2020) – $101-200/Month

    1. avatarKevin Ohashi Post author

      They didn’t choose to participate this year. WPEngine didn’t participate the year before either. Kinsta was in the middle of upgrading their platform and didn’t want the old one tested. I hope to see them next year.

      Reply

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