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Monthly Archives: September 2018

SiteGround Review (2018)

SiteGround participated for the fifth time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. Last year SiteGround competed in four price tiers and earned 3 Top Tier awards.  This year SiteGround competed in the <$25, $25-50, and Enterprise tier.

SiteGround is one of the oldest competitors in our benchmarks and have for years now topped our reviews based on what people say on social media leading the shared category by a whopping 13% over the next highest competitor at the time of writing (Sep 2018).

The Products

Plan Name Plan Monthly Price Plan Visitors Allowed Plan Disk Space Plan Bandwidth
Plan Sites Allowed
GrowBig $14.95 Suitable for ~ 25,000 Visits Monthly 20GB Unmetered Unlimited
GoGeek $29.95 Suitable for ~ 100,000 Visits Monthly 30GB Unmetered Unlimited
Enterprise $4,800 Unlimited $1 per 1GB for distrbuted storage + shared file system 10TB Custom

Enterprise was a custom setup: 8 servers - 2 load balancers, 4 application nodes (PHP workers) and two MySQL database servers. Every server had 16GB of RAM. The total RAM for the whole solution was 128GB RAM.

Performance Review

Load Storm

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)
<25 316,826 14 242.02 176.01 5,361 445 21.18 16.98 11.76
25-50 317,462 16 245.1 176.37 4,569 404 21.23 17.25 11.79
Enterprise 1,443,091 15 1,151.40 801.72 15,086 209 105.15 84.68 58.42

Sources: <25, 25-50, Enterprise

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

SiteGround aced the LoadStorm tests having minimal errors across every price tier. The enterprise configuration really shined here and makes it clear the value of all the redundancy and scalabliity where it had half the average response time and handled 1.43 million requests without issue.

Load Impact

Requests Errors Data Transferred (GB) Peak Average Load Time (Seconds) Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)
Peak Average Requests/Sec
<25 318163 4 16.97 0.556 264 605
25-50 316927 0 16.89 0.531 280 642
Enterprise 1627518 7 87.96 0.618 1370 3100

Sources: <25, 25-50, Enterprise

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

SiteGround again aced the Load Impact tests. Nearly no errors on <25 and Enterprise and zero on the 25-50 test.

Uptime

UptimeRobot StatusCake
<25 99.99 99.99
25-50 99 98.94
Enterprise 99.96 100

The <25 and Enterprise didn't have any uptime issues. Unfortunately the 25-50 plan ran into some issues. SiteGround issued a statement about the issue:

"The recorded downtime for the SiteGround GoGeek hosting plan during the test was not a result of actual server availability issues. The uptime is below 99.9% because during performance testing an automatic limitation system temporarily kicked in, in a way that prevented the uptime test to be properly executed. SiteGround confirmed that this particular limitation system should not have been active on the tested accounts and is currently not active on any of their production servers."

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

PHP Bench WP Bench
<25 10.49 1157.407407
25-50 10.44 890.4719501
Enterprise 10.457 196.6181675

The WPPerformanceTester results were average. The distributed nature of the Enterprise shows quite clearly how having redundant and scalable systems can reduce thoroughput on the WP Bench (MySQL) when you run multiple and separate database servers.

<25 25-50 Enterprise
Dulles 0.432 0.508 0.812
Denver 1.489 1.358 1.342
LA 0.909 0.894 1.06
London 0.937 1.082 0.998
Frankfurt 1.087 1.235 0.999
Rose Hill, Mauritius 1.945 2.108 2.636
Singapore 2.088 2.564 1.908
Mumbai 1.957 2.329 2.109
Japan 1.617 1.769 1.394
Sydney 1.781 2.126 1.588
Brazil 1.392 1.565 1.187

Nothing special to say here, it performed as expected.

Conclusion

SiteGround had excellent load testing performances. Load Storm and Load Impact results were great across the board. The <25 plan also had the second fewest errors cumulatively in its price tier. The 25-50 plan looked solid except there was an uptime issue which disqualified it from earning top tier status. SiteGround's Enterprise offering was a new entry in the tier. They made quite a splash with an 8 server configuration which handled our heaviest load tests without batting an eye. It's nice to see SiteGround offering great performance at an entry level price point and being able to scale that performance up to an Enterprise grade solution.

Web Hosting

CloudWays Review (2018)

CloudWays participated for the fourth time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. This year CloudWays participated in the 25-50, 51-100 and 201-500 price tiers.

In years past it's been interesting to see CloudWays compete with the same stack on different platforms. This year is the furthest departure from that we've seen so far. It's also the first time CloudWays has earned Top Tier status for two out of three plans that competed this year. It's also important to note, the Digital Ocean plan was originally $70 when testing started but Digital Ocean reduced their pricing causing the cost of the plan to drop dramatically to $42 hence the competing in a different tier above (51-100).

The Products

Plan Monthly Price Plan Visitors Allowed Plan Memory/RAM Plan Disk Space Plan Bandwidth
Plan Sites Allowed
Vultr 4GB New York $44 Unlimited 4GB 60GB SSD 3 TB Unlimited
DigitalOcean 4GB $42 Unlimited 4GB 80gb 4TB unlimited
AWS EC2 - 2XL - USA N.Virginia $495.50 Unlimited 32GB Starts from 4GB (variable) 2GB Unlimited

Performance Review

Load Storm

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 770,304 822 607.12 427.95 15,083 324 52.27 42.27 29.04
CloudWays Vultr 328,015 0 249.5 182.23 7,372 360 22.27 18.55 12.37
CloudWays DO 442,424 243 331.95 245.79 15,097 1,131 30.11 21.79 16.73

Sources: AWS, Vultr, DO

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

The Vultr plan had no issue, the AWS and DO had a few errors but around 0.1% which is negligible. The big issue was Digital Ocean's response time started to increase as the load increased which knocked it out of earning Top Tier status. AWS and Vultr did great overall. With the price change, I wonder if the smaller test would have been handled better though.

Load Impact

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
CloudWays Vultr 335275 0 18.21 0.544 278 624
CloudWays DO 457906 30 24.89 1.92 312 702

Sources: AWS, Vultr, DO.

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

AWS and Vultr handled it perfectly with zero errors. Digital Ocean had a miniscule 30 errors but an increased response time as the test went on. Great showing overall on the Load Impact test for AWS and Vultr.

Uptime

UptimeRobot StatusCake
CloudWays AWS 100 100
CloudWays Vultr 100 100
CloudWays DO 100 100

Perfect. Across the board, perfect uptime.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

PHP Bench WP Bench
CloudWays AWS 8.831 266.5955745
CloudWays Vultr 9.616 346.1405331
CloudWays DO 13.421 135.7036233

The WPPerformanceTester results are normal.

CloudWays AWS CloudWays Vultr CloudWays DO
Dulles 0.312 0.33 0.328
Denver 1.137 1.305 1.101
LA 0.924 1.014 1.069
London 0.763 0.725 0.718
Frankfurt 0.816 0.785 0.819
Rose Hill, Mauritius 1.867 2.497 1.86
Singapore 2.281 2.163 2.25
Mumbai 1.65 2.287 1.646
Japan 1.578 1.613 1.573
Sydney 1.837 1.978 2.068
Brazil 1.1 1.195 1.172

The WPT tests look good. The Dulles test scores were some of the fastest, especially the CloudWays AWS server which was located in the same testing data center.

Conclusion

Hard work does pay off. CloudWays has been participating for years and continually has been improving. Two Top Tier awards for AWS and Vultr plans. The Digital Ocean plan unfortunately didn't share the same honor but it seems it was competing above its weight with a price drop that would have put it one cost tier below now.

Pressable Review (2018)

Pressable participated for the third time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. Pressable participated in the following price brackets: <$25, $51-100, $101-200, $201-500, and Enterprise.

In the previous test, Pressable earned four Top Tier status out of 5. This year Pressable earned 5/5 Top Tier awards.

The Products

Plan Name Plan Monthly Price Plan Visitors Allowed Plan Disk Space Plan Bandwidth
Plan Sites Allowed
5 Sites $25 60,000 pageviews unlimited unlimited 5
20 Sites $90 400,000 pageviews unlimited unlimited 20
Agency 1 $135 600,000 pageviews unlimited unlimited 30
Agency 3 $225 1,000,000 pageviews unlimited unlimited 50
VIP 2 $750.00 5 million pageviews unlimited Unlimited 100

Performance Review

Load Storm

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)
<$25 330,412 487 249.85 183.56 10102 268 21.65 17.38 12.03
$51-100 475,785 1,112 371.22 264.32 10,192 318 31.17 25.48 17.32
$101-200 622,516 1,555 490.82 345.84 15,063 320 40.76 32.76 22.65
$200-$500 766,477 2,603 610.07 425.82 15,273 355 49.98 40.48 27.77
Enterprise 1,480,277 1,901 1,180.13 822.38 10,719 484 102.15 81.81 56.75

Sources: <25, 51-100, 101-200, 201-500, Enterprise

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

The error rates were a bit higher than before on Load Storm but they seemed to almost exclusively be an issue with the Tokyo testing location for Load Storm. There wasn't any other real noticeable impact, but it was a consistent minor issue in all the tests. The average response times were excellent and error rates were still under control given the Tokyo issue.

Load Impact

Requests Errors Data Transferred (GB) Peak Average Load Time (Seconds) Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)
Peak Average Requests/Sec
<$25 326903 21 17.73 0.486 482.1 1060
$51-100 656609 3 34.75 0.443 573 1260
$101-200 979942 21 53.2 0.462 685 1900
$200-$500 977315 27 53.06 0.475 831 1820
Enterprise 1389420 0 77.63 0.773 1150 2520

Sources: <25, 51-100, 101-200, 201-500, Enterprise

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

Pressable across the board did fantastic. The enterprise level even managed a perfect run without any errors.

Uptime

UptimeRobot StatusCake
<$25/month 99.99 99.99
$51-100/month 99.94 100
$101-200/month 100 99.99
$200-$500/month 99.93 100
Enterprise 99.98 99.99

Overall every plan maintained above 99.9%. I'd like to see it closes to 100 than 99.9 given their past issue was uptime in the previous test, but overall they improved this year keeping every plan above 99.9% which is great.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

PHP Bench WP Bench
<$25/month 10.87 562.7462015
$51-100/month 10.998 556.7928731
$101-200/month 10.803 471.6981132
$200-$500/month 10.797 540.8328826
Enterprise 10.924 529.1005291

The WPPerformanceTester results were pretty uniform across all the price tiers. Given the infrastructure is shared this makes a lot of sense. You get the same performance from the lowest price to the enterprise tier.

 

<$25 51-100 101-200 201-500 Enterprise
Dulles 0.468 0.479 0.474 0.495 0.563
Denver 1.366 1.334 1.384 1.315 2.261
LA 1.008 0.879 1.037 0.971 1.304
London 0.862 0.856 0.868 0.856 1.161
Frankfurt 0.947 0.923 0.881 0.863 1.334
Rose Hill, Mauritius 2.347 2.355 2.362 2.36 3.823
Singapore 2.436 2.224 2.223 2.339 3.068
Mumbai 2.59 1.828 2.558 2.555 2.447
Japan 1.698 1.733 1.748 1.579 2.106
Sydney 1.923 1.903 1.932 1.912 2.771
Brazil 1.389 1.375 1.444 1.397 1.897

The WPT tests look relatively normal. The only strange thing I noticed is that the Enterprise tier was slower in almost every case compared to the other plans. I have no idea why, could just be a timing issue when the tests were run.

Conclusion

This year Pressable stepped up their performance game just that extra bit to push all five plans into earning Top Tier status. When you're near the top it's those little gains that make all the difference. A well earned 5/5 Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance from Review Signal in 2018.

pressable234x60

LightningBase Review (2018)

LightningBase participated for the fourth time in a row in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. This year LightningBase entered in the <$25/month and $25-50/month price brackets.

LightningBase has consistently earned Top Tier status in every year they've participated. This year was no exception.

The Products

Plan Name Plan Monthly Price Plan Visitors Allowed Plan Memory/RAM Plan Disk Space Plan Bandwidth
Plan Sites Allowed
Personal $9.95 10,000 (Guideline*) 3 GB 1 GB 10 GB 1
Medium $49.95 100,000 (Guideline*) 6 GB 15 GB 100 GB 10
  • Guideline based on the resources provided, although if most are cached and the site is efficient this may be exceeded dramatically, as we don't artificially limit pageviews.

Performance Review

Load Storm

Plan 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)
<$25 449,766 93 365.18 249.87 15,096 419 25.38 21.35 14.1
$25-50 455,551 16 360.55 253.08 15,099 401 25.72 21.06 14.29

Sources: https://pro.loadstorm.com/#!test/562070, https://pro.loadstorm.com/#!test/562159

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

In both tests there were minimal errors and the average response time was stable at just over 400ms. The tests at these price tiers are identical, so it's logical that the more expensive plan slightly outperformed the cheaper one.

Load Impact

Requests Errors Data Transferred (GB) Peak Average Load Time (Seconds) Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)
Peak Average Requests/Sec
<$25 339672 0 18.26 0.412 300.6 682
$25-50 338834 0 18.19 0.398 302 688

Source: <25, 25-50

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

LightningBase had perfect results on the Load Impact test, zero errors and no noticeable impact on response times.

Uptime

Uptime Robot and StatusCake both showed 100% uptime across the board for LightningBase.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

PHP Bench WP Bench
8.678 1388.888889
8.726 1288.659794

The WPPerformanceTester results were quite fast. The WP bench scores were very fast (the second fastest in both price tiers).

<25 Load Time 25-50 Load Time
Dulles 0.429 0.429
Denver 1.212 1.118
LA 0.843 0.797
London 1.169 1.173
Frankfurt 1.091 1.186
Rose Hill, Mauritius 2.435 2.436
Singapore 1.863 1.728
Mumbai 2.33 2.098
Japan 1.292 1.304
Sydney 1.762 1.771
Brazil 1.511 1.479

Nothing much to say about the WebPageTest results. They were decidedly normal which is what most people need unless you're targeting a specific geographic region.

Conclusion

LightningBase. Another year, another set of near perfect runs. 100% uptime. Great load tests. This is the 4th year in a row LightningBase has earned top tier recognition. It seems almost expected at this point. I'm still puzzled how they are still flying so far under the radar.

 

lightning-base-logo

Incendia Web Works Review (2018)

Incendia Web Works (IWW) participated for the second time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. This year IWW entered in the same <$25/month price tier.

In the previous test, IWW aced the load tests but fell a bit short on the uptime monitors which prevented them from earning Top Tier status.  In 2018, IWW improved on their first year performance all around and earned themselves Top Tier status from Review Signal.

The Product

Plan Monthly Price Visitors Allowed Disk Space Bandwidth Sites Allowed
Enterprise WordPress Ultimate SSD $16.49 N/A 10 GB 750 GB 1

Performance Review

Load Storm

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)
294,518 0 222.42 163.62 4,070 348 21.29 17.14 11.83

Source: https://pro.loadstorm.com#!test/562123

IWW performed great in the Load Storm test. The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts. The most important number is zero errors, every request was responded to. The average response time was 358ms which is also fantastic and good for third best average out of the 15 companies tested in this price bracket.

Load Impact

Requests Errors Data Transferred (GB) Peak Average Load Time (Seconds) Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps) Peak Average Requests/Sec
339517 0 17.06 0.414 253.9 617

Source: Load Impact Results

IWW managed zero errors again for the Load Impact test. The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue. They also had the second lowest peak average load time (second by a mere 2ms). Another great performance for IWW.

Uptime

IWW had 99.99% uptime on UptimeRobot and 99.97% uptime on StatusCake.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

PHP Bench WP Bench
6.63 749.6251874

The WPPerformanceTester results were the fastest of any company in the price tier for PHP bench.

WPT Location Load Time
Dulles 0.366
Denver 1.21
LA 1.094
London 0.791
Frankfurt 0.894
Rose Hill 1.988
Singapore 2.243
Mumbai 2.432
Japan 1.713
Sydney 2.081
Brazil 1.207

Not a whole lot to say about the WPT results. IWW had the fastest response time in Brazil of any company in the price bracket.

Conclusion

Incendia Web Works had some uptime issues last year which marred their results. This year no such thing happened. IWW continued to have great load testing results and earned itself Top Tier status. They had flawless load test results being the only company with 0 errors on both LoadStorm and LoadImpact. It's nice to see companies improve their consistency and earn a higher ranking.

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