$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.

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.

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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.

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