$25-50/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 $25-50/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	373,598	0	278.68	207.55	3,889	334	22.48	17	12
Incendia Web Works	379,506	0	284.22	210.84	5,886	386	23.27	18	13
Kinsta	369,395	36	272.85	205.22	2,622	505	22.66	17	13
Krystal Hosting	357,327	0	257.42	198.51	8,058	651	21.35	16	12
Pantheon	420,625	133	328.20	233.68	10,022	134	24.21	20	13
Pressable	427,147	23	309.13	237.30	3,756	457	23.55	18	13
Savvii	321,332	89,069	244.33	178.52	15,348	1,280	7,613	5,362	4,230
SiteGround	518,673	1,662	377.45	288.15	6,746	414	22.24	16	12
WordPress.com Business	641,101	12,404	491	356.17	14,070	173	28.08	22	16
WPX Hosting	417,415	42	318.88	231.90	4,642	163	24.16	19	13

Discussion

Cloudways [Reviews], IWW, Kinsta, Krystal Hosting, Pantheon [Reviews], Pressable, and WPX Hosting all handled the Load Storm test without any issues.

WordPress.com Business had a security measure we couldn't work around that was causing some errors on wp-login but had zero errors outside of that, they managed to have the third fastest average response time.

Saavii did not handle this test well.

SiteGround [Reviews] had some minor issues with a tiny 0.32% error rate.

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
WordPress.com Business	368432	0	24.83	288	406	735
Cloudways	284176	0	15.82	711	279	608
Incendia Web Works	291894	0	16.15	864	250	551
Kinsta	301610	0	16.76	619	283	621
Krystal Hosting	246236	1	13.73	1300	196	428
Pantheon	450452	1	28.24	28	476	927
Pressable	280431	4	15.89	758	260	558
Savvii	290636	0	16.22	755	274	600
SiteGround	296498	0	16.57	694	280	612
WPX Hosting	430783	10	23.78	177	400	884

Discussion

Cloudways, IWW, Kinsta, Pantheon, Pressable, Savvii, SiteGround, WordPress.com Business and WPX Hosting all handled the Load Impact test without issue.

Krystal Hosting started to slow down and show increased response times.

Uptime Monitoring Results

Results Table

Company Name	UptimeRobot	StatusCake	StatusCake Avg Response Time
Cloudways	99.99	99.99%	0.474s
Incendia Web Works	96.945	100%	0.586s
Kinsta	100	100%	0.337s
Krystal Hosting	99.974	100%	0.363s
Pantheon	100	100%	0.067s
Pressable	100	99.96%	0.643s
Savvii	99.987	100%	0.715s
SiteGround	99.993	100%	0.596s
WordPress.com Business	100	100%	0.261s
WPX Hosting	100	100%	0.265s

Discussion

Incendia Web Works downtime was because of a bad SSL certificate renewal bug in their system. Two of three servers got the updated certificate after 3 month renewal of Lets Encrypt and one didn't sync causing the uptime monitor to report downtime if it got the bad certificate. It's been fixed, but it wasn't early enough for the downtime to show up as below the 99.9% threshold expected. Because of the way each of the monitoring systems work, it seems StatusCake was more forgiving about SSL certs showing 100% uptime. The website never actually went offline, but users might have gotten an SSL warning.

Everyone else was above the 99.9% threshold.

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	0.741	0.809	0.688	1.041	1.18	2.523
Incendia Web Works	0.446	1.197	0.844	0.753	0.813	2.612
Kinsta	0.544	0.984	0.938	0.978	1.056	2.303
Krystal Hosting	0.907	1.536	1.444	0.483	0.483	2.562
Pantheon	0.416	0.92	0.544	0.402	0.678	1.594
Pressable	0.582	1.687	1.957	1.148	1.29	3.769
Savvii	0.902	1.278	1.395	0.45	0.801	2.284
SiteGround	0.563	0.748	1.121	0.942	1.084	2.521
WordPress.com Business	0.696	1.593	0.891	0.934	1.137	2.53
WPX Hosting	0.384	0.701	1.007	0.358	1.25	2.871

Company Name	WPT Singapore	WPT Mumbai	WPT Japan	WPT Sydney	WPT Brazil
Cloudways	1.416	1.814	0.895	1.475	1.341
Incendia Web Works	1.952	1.986	1.321	1.918	1.095
Kinsta	1.714	1.999	1.261	1.55	1.394
Krystal Hosting	2.047	2.012	1.977	2.615	1.64
Pantheon	0.937	0.919	0.795	0.952	0.813
Pressable	3.155	2.902	2.141	2.736	2.164
Savvii	1.999	1.74	2.499	2.976	2.165
SiteGround	2.017	1.883	1.488	2.028	1.301
WordPress.com Business	1.276	2.026	1.129	1.491	1.18
WPX Hosting	1.638	2.921	1.402	2.268	2.02

Discussion

Pantheon was the fastest in 7/11 locations and second fastest in 3/11. Pressable was the slowest in 6/11 locations.

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 Name	PHP Bench	WP Bench
Cloudways	7.265	729.9270073
Incendia Web Works	6.854	1019.367992
Kinsta	10.55	1085.77633
Krystal Hosting	10.365	488.5197851
Pantheon	9.291	312.3048095
Pressable	11.557	385.3564547
Savvii	13.687	60.90504903
SiteGround	8.838	1009.081736
WordPress.com Business	9.479	838.9261745
WPX Hosting	7.714	1119.820829

Discussion

Savvii had a very low WP Bench which measures the number of WordPress database queries per second. It also had the highest PHP Bench for how long it took to execute a series of functions.

Qualsys SSL Report Grade

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

Results Table

Company Name	Qualys SSL Report
Cloudways	A
Incendia Web Works	A+
Kinsta	A
Krystal Hosting	A
Pantheon	A
Pressable	A
Savvii	A
SiteGround	A
WordPress.com Business	A
WPX Hosting	A

Discussion

Everyone got an A. IWW got an A+.

Conclusion

Top Tier

Cloudways [Reviews], Kinsta, Pantheon [Reviews], Pressable and WPX Hosting all earned Top Tier status this year and didn't have any issues with these tests.

Honorable Mention

WordPress.com Business and SiteGround [Reviews] both earned honorable mention status. WordPress.com Business had some security issues we couldn't work around for the Load Storm test that caused a higher error rate that excluded it from Top Tier status. SiteGround also had some higher than perfect error rates on the Load Storm test.

Individual Host Analysis

Cloudways [Reviews]

Cloudways has continued it's excellent performance from last year with a back to back Top Tier award. 99.9% uptime on both monitors, and zero load testing errors made them an easy shoe in for Top Tier status.

Incendia Web Works

An SSL bug caused some downtime which put them below the threshold for earning recognition unfortunately this year. Otherwise, their load testing results were flawless with zero errors. IWW for the past three years has had excellent speed, I'm sad to see them disqualified from earning any recognition.

Kinsta

Kinsta earned Top Tier status yet again. One of only two companies that has earned Top Tier status on every plan, every year for the past 5 years.

Krystal Hosting

A new entrant that did very well. Uptime was 99.97% and 100%. Load Storm had no errors or increased response time. It was borderline honorable mention but the Load Impact test showed a large spike and increased response time which kept it out of honorable mention status.

Pantheon [Reviews]

Fast. While maintaining a perfect 100%/100% uptimes they were also the fastest average response time in both load tests and uptime monitoring. In the WPT test Pantheon was the fastest in 7/11 locales and third in 3/11. A truly excellent performance which earned them Top Tier recognition.

Pressable

A Top Tier performance from Pressable. It wasn't the absolute fastest, but it had a combined 27 errors across both load tests and 100%/99.96% uptime. A consistent and near perfect experience from a company that has for years earned Top Tier status.

Savvii

Another new entrant for this year's testing. The uptime and Load Impact tests looked good. The Load Storm test seemed to overload the server completely though. I also am not sure what's going on with the WP Bench, it was very low which might be why the Load Storm test didn't go well. There was some communication issues because a key staff person left mid-testing, hoping to see much better results next year.

SiteGround [Reviews]

A very solid performance that earned honorable mention recognition. The only ding against it was a handful of errors on the Load Storm test which kept it out of being a Top Tier performance.

WordPress.com Business

Automattic finally entered at the lower price end after competing with their VIP offering for years. Their new plans actually allowed us to test and the results were quite good. The only drawback was a security limit which couldn't be changed for the Load Storm test which caused some errors on the wp-login file. There wasn't any errors to any other resource at all. They were in the top 3 for fastest response time in all load tests and uptime monitoring as well. I wish we could have had a clean Load Storm test, but it was a great showing otherwise.

WPX Hosting

The return of WPX to these tests has been a welcome one. They earned Top Tier status again with 100%/100% uptime and almost no errors on Load Tests. They were even the fastest in three of eleven WPT tests.