$201-500/Month WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2019)

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/month 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 table for full product information.

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)
Cloudways	878,558	19	680.58	488.09	15,093	418	52.82	42	29
Kinsta	892,859	5	686.63	496.03	13,320	448	54.78	42	30
Liquid Web	600,743	2	425.03	333.75	15,072	1,750	34.39	23	19
Pantheon	984,943	4,047	770.43	547.19	10,039	320	56	44	31
Pressable	1,007,886	92	774.00	559.94	5,482	412	55.52	43	31
Servebolt.com	1,374,106	160	1,082.55	763.39	15,084	131	51.84	41	29

Discussion

Cloudways [Reviews], Kinsta, Pressable, and Servebolt all handled this test without issue.

LiquidWeb [Reviews] showed a significant increase in response time.

Pantheon [Reviews] had 0.41% error rate and showed a small increase in response time.

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
Cloudways	1203250	0	67.53	722	1120	2430
Kinsta	1181701	0	65.69	635	1080	2370
Liquid Web	324931	3	18.3	9270	180	390
Pantheon	1757119	2	101.65	49	1480	3130
Pressable	1095126	1	62.3	961	978	2050
Servebolt.com	1576499	16	87.32	148	1350	2980

Discussion

Cloudways, Kinsta, Pantheon, and Servebolt.com all handled the Load Impact test without issue.

LiquidWeb showed significantly increased response times as the test progressed.

Pressable showed a small increase response times as the test progressed.

Uptime Monitoring Results

Results Table

Company Name	UptimeRobot	StatusCake	StatusCake Avg Response Time
Cloudways	100	100%	0.376s
Kinsta	100	100%	0.426s
Liquid Web	100	100%	0.644s
Pantheon	100	100%	0.078s
Pressable	100	99.95%	0.801s
Servebolt.com	100	100%	0.080s

Discussion

Perfect for every company on every monitor except one showing 99.95%.

WebPageTest.org Results

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

Results Table

Company Name	WPT Dulles	WPT Denver	WPT LA	WPT London	WPT Frankfurt	WPT Rose Hill, Mauritius
Cloudways	0.543	1.07	0.696	0.829	0.938	1.977
Kinsta	0.592	0.725	0.789	0.998	1.092	2.3
Liquid Web	0.523	0.851	0.901	0.885	1.119	2.299
Pantheon	0.4	0.724	0.57	0.407	0.691	1.654
Pressable	0.571	2.297	1.717	1.217	1.463	3.721
Servebolt.com	0.438	1.135	1.124	0.443	0.487	0.962

Company Name	WPT Singapore	WPT Mumbai	WPT Japan	WPT Sydney	WPT Brazil
Cloudways	1.437	1.749	1.233	1.321	1.149
Kinsta	1.708	2.03	1.237	1.542	1.386
Liquid Web	1.844	1.826	1.426	1.8	1.158
Pantheon	0.995	0.94	0.769	0.955	0.766
Pressable	3.232	2.686	2.311	2.679	2.192
Servebolt.com	0.478	0.734	0.453	0.513	0.493

Discussion

Servebolt.com was the fastest in 7/11 locales and the second fastest in 2/11 locales.

Pantheon was the fastest in 4/11, and second fastest in 7/11 locales.

Pressable was the slowest in 10/11 locales.

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	PHP Bench (Seconds)	WP Bench (Queries/Second)
Cloudways	9.388	427.3504274
Kinsta	10.602	1069.518717
Liquid Web	10.856	626.1740764
Pantheon	10.541	271.5177844
Pressable	10.654	468.3840749
Servebolt.com	3.814	1533.742331

Discussion

Servebolt was the fastest in both benchmarks.

Qualsys SSL Report Grade

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

Results Table

Company Name	Qualys SSL Report
Cloudways	A
Kinsta	A
Liquid Web	A
Pantheon	A+
Pressable	A
Servebolt.com	A+

Discussion

A's for everyone. Pantheon and Servebolt earned A+.

Conclusion

Top Tier

Cloudways [Reviews], Kinsta and Servebolt.com all handled the tests without issue.

Honorable Mention

Pressable and Pantheon [Reviews] both earned honorable mention status. Pressable started to show minor signs of load during the Load Impact test. Pantheon started to show signs of load during the Load Storm test.

Individual Host Analysis

Cloudways [Reviews]

Perfect uptime and 19 cumulative load testing errors. A great showing from Cloudways' Google cloud offering which earned Top Tier status.

Kinsta

Five errors, total. Perfect uptime. It's almost boring giving Kinsta another Top Tier award.

LiquidWeb [Reviews]

Perfect uptime and five cumulative errors. Again, the problem was response times started to soar as the load tests went on. While Liquid Web handled every request, it got very slow during the load tests.

Pantheon [Reviews]

Pantheon had perfect uptime and the fastest average response time for the Load Impact test. Pantheon had a 0.41% error rate during the Load Storm test and the average response times were low but had a noticeable increase towards the end which kept them from earning Top Tier status, but did earn them an Honorable Mention.

Pressable

Pressable did very well with 100 and 99.95% uptime. The only knock was their Load Impact test started to show signs of load with increased response times. Pressable deserves a very Honorable Mention.

Servebolt.com

Servebolt had the fastest Load Storm response times along with perfect uptime. They also were the fastest in 7/11 locations on the WebPageTest. Easily earned itself Top Tier status.