WordPress.com VIP Review (2018)

WordPress.com VIP participated for the second time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. This year WordPress.com VIP entered in the same Enterprise price tier again.

In the previous test, WP.com VIP aced the Enterprise test and earned the Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance award from Review Signal. Considering who is behind it, the expectations behind WP.com VIP are enormous.

The Product

Plan Name	Plan Monthly Price	Plan Visitors Allowed	Plan Memory/RAM	Plan Disk Space	Plan Bandwidth	Plan Sites Allowed
WordPress.com VIP	$5,000	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	5

Performance Review

Load Storm

Plan Tier	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)
Enterprise	1,749,966	3	1,400.53	972.2	7,484	108	147.94	118.68	82.19

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.

Three errors out of 1.75 million requests. VIP also had the fastest average response time at 108ms. Simply astonishing.

Load Impact

Plan Tier	Requests	Errors	Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Average Load Time (Seconds)	Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)	Peak Average Requests/Sec
Enterprise	2085775	6	119.88	0.102	1860	3960

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.

Six errors in over 2 million requests is another top notch performance. VIP also had the lowest average response time of any company.

Uptime

Plan Tier	UptimeRobot	StatusCake
Enterprise	99.95	100

The uptime results were great. 100 and 99.95% is very respectable.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Plan Tier	Enterprise
Dulles	0.334
Denver	1.112
LA	0.649
London	0.444
Frankfurt	0.353
Rose Hill, Mauritius	0.874
Singapore	0.395
Mumbai	0.544
Japan	0.358
Sydney	0.506
Brazil	0.363

I rarely comment about WebPageTest results but WordPress.com VIP deserves a special mention here. There were 11 test locations and VIP was the fastest in 9/11 and was 22 ms and 9 ms behind the fastest in the other two test locations. I've never seen any company be so dominant across the globe in terms of performance.

Plan Tier	PHP Bench	WP Bench
Enterprise	9.18	798.084597

The WPPerformanceTester results were normal.

Conclusion

WordPress.com VIP's sophomore performance didn't experience a slump. In fact, they seemed to have stepped up their game. Not only did they put on a better Load Storm performance, their response times across the globe were fantastic. WordPress.com VIP earned themselves a second Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance award this year and was quite a stand out in many regards in a very crowded and well performing field.