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.