$201-500/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 $201-500 price bracket for WordPress Hosting.

Other Price Tier Results

<$25/Month Tier $25-50/Month Tier $51-100/Month Tier $101-200/Month Tier $201-500/Month Tier $500+/Month (Enterprise) Tier

Hosting Plan Details

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

Load Storm Testing Results

This test scaled from 500 to 5000 users over 30 minutes with 10 minutes at the peak.

Results Table

	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)
CloudWays AWS	770304	822	607.12	427.95	15083	324	52.27	42.27	29.04
Kinsta	688856	0	543.12	382.7	4407	358	50.08	40.47	27.82
Nestify	585655	26211	439.6	325.36	15841	1966	33.74	25.44	18.75
Pantheon	702823	7065	544.27	390.46	11462	455	52.65	43.64	29.25
Pressable	766477	2603	610.07	425.82	15273	355	49.98	40.48	27.77

Discussion

Kinsta handled this test without issue. CloudWays [Reviews] AWS had a weird issue with Frankfurt where all the errors came from. Pressable had the same Tokyo issue but otherwise was just fine.

Pantheon [Reviews] started showing some signs of load with increased error rates and response times towards the end of the test.

Nestify had increased response times then errors.

Load Impact Testing Results

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

Results Table

	Requests	Errors	Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Average Load Time (Seconds)	Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)	Peak Average Requests/Sec
CloudWays AWS	1049669	0	57	0.36	908	1990
Kinsta	1014718	0	54.34	0.411	866	1930
Nestify	175257	5000	8.93	21.02	96	235
Pantheon	1257940	0	69.92	0.173	1020	2240
Pressable	977315	27	53.06	0.475	831	1820

Discussion

CloudWays [Reviews] AWS, Kinsta, Pantheon [Reviews] and Pressable all handled this test without issue.

Nestify had increased response times then errors.

Uptime Monitoring Results

Results Table

	UptimeRobot	StatusCake
CloudWays AWS	100	100
Kinsta	100	100
Nestify	99.91	99.96
Pantheon	99.97	100
Pressable	99.93	100

Discussion

All the companies maintained good uptime.

WebPageTest.org Results

Results Table

	WPT Dulles	WPT Denver	WPT LA	WPT London	WPT Frankfurt	WPT Rose Hill, Mauritius
CloudWays AWS	0.312	1.137	0.924	0.763	0.816	1.867
Kinsta	0.396	1.134	0.832	1.177	1.031	2.439
Nestify	0.357	1.574	1.206	0.79	0.908	2.858
Pantheon	0.353	1.236	0.804	0.45	0.375	1.088
Pressable	0.495	1.315	0.971	0.856	0.863	2.36

	WPT Singapore	WPT Mumbai	WPT Japan	WPT Sydney	WPT Brazil
CloudWays AWS	2.281	1.65	1.578	1.837	1.1
Kinsta	1.712	2.119	1.268	1.772	1.508
Nestify	2.417	2.541	1.871	2.216	1.327
Pantheon	0.045	0.662	0.393	0.516	0.4
Pressable	2.339	2.555	1.579	1.912	1.397

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 3.70 seconds. For instance, Dulles dropped from 0.81 to 0.38 seconds on average.

WPPerformanceTester Results

Results Table

	PHP Bench	WP Bench
CloudWays AWS	8.831	266.5955745
Kinsta	9.048	1047.120419
Nestify	12.526	125.7229067
Pantheon	8.723	294.55081
Pressable	10.797	540.8328826

Discussion

Pantheon had the fastest PHP bench and Kinsta had the fastest WP bench.

The average PHP bench went from 11.92 to 9.99 from the 2016 benchmarks in this price tier. The average WP bench went from 385 to 455. The PHP and WP bench both improved for 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

CloudWays [Reviews] AWS, Kinsta, and Pressable all earned Top Tier status this year for going through all the tests without any significant issues.

Honorable Mention

Pantheon [Reviews] earned honorable mention status.

Individual Host Analysis

CloudWays AWS

Nice to see CloudWays [Reviews] AWS earn another Top Tier status after many years of participation. Perfect uptime and minimal issue with the load tests.

Kinsta

Kinsta managed a perfect run. Zero errors on both load tests and 100% uptime. Congrats on earning yet another Top Tier award.

Nestify

Nestify. I am so happy to see a new company competing on so many tiers. I am disappointed the bottleneck of 100 Mbps connection seems to have really hampered their results at most price tiers. Good uptime and snappy response times from WebPageTest were again marred by load test results which saturated their network.

Pantheon

Pantheon [Reviews] earned an honorable mention. They continued to have great uptime. Load Impact was a breeze. But Load Storm started to show some signs of load and just kept them out of the top tier at this price tier.

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.