WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2020

WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2020) – $25-50/Month

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.

Hosting Plan Details

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)
1&1 IONOS SE 234,689 493 (0.21%) 171 130 15,285 2,148.00 16.52 11 9.179
WordPress.com Business 748,064 14 (0%) 596 416 15,064.00 68.00 32 26 18
Cloudways 278,787 11 (0%) 206 155 15,101 1,153.00 15.41 11 8.561
highavailability.io 395,491 18 (0%) 294 220 15,006 450.00 21.63 16 12
Nestify 366,719 1 (0%) 280.67 203.73 15,058.00 481 22.63 17.34 13
Onyx 371,118 36 (0.01%) 282.67 206.18 13,671 609 21.84 16.71 12
Pantheon 354,355 4 (0%) 296 197 3,408.00 106.00 20 17 11
Pressable 492,156 6 (0%) 377 273.42 2,402.00 93.00 25 20 14
Seravo 327,441 3 (0%) 265.35 181.91 10,035 375 16.57 13.65 9.205
Servebolt.com 554,186 49 (0.01%) 662 307.88 15,156.00 128.00 20 25.64 11.29
SiteGround 459,967 1 (0%) 339 256 3,465 229.00 24.49 18 14
WPX Hosting 446,395 90 (0.02%) 334 248 15,100.00 145.00 24 18 14

Full interactive results can be referenced here.

Discussion

WordPress.com Business (Automattic), HighAvailability, Nestify, Onyx, Pantheon [Reviews], Pressable, Seravo, Servebolt, SiteGround [Reviews] and WPX Hosting all handled this test without any issues.

1&1 IONOS [Reviews] and Cloudways [Reviews] slowed down but didn't error out.

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
1&1 IONOS SE 293129 0 16.33 675 261.07 572
WordPress.com Business 448550 0 29.8 38 506.48 931
Cloudways 265772 25 14.98 1450 192.9 418
highavailability.io 293902 0 16.04 699 277.67 621
Nestify 296475 0 16.55 649 262.3 574
Onyx 277224 0 15.7 836 270.69 583
Pantheon 449874 0 25.85 23 380.25 808
Pressable 449760 0 25.33 299 436.6 946
Seravo 299282 0 16.68 628 281.61 619
Servebolt.com 433336 0 24.17 74 407.11 891
SiteGround 370867 0 20.71 275 326.51 714
WPX Hosting 427313 3 24.01 123 407.96 886

Full interactive results can be referenced here.

Discussion

1&1 IONOS, WordPress.com Business (Automattic), HighAvailability, Nestify, Onyx, Pantheon, Pressable, Seravo, Servebolt, SiteGround and WPX Hosting all handled this test without issue.

Cloudways slowed down and had peak average response time climb to almost 1.5s.

Uptime Monitoring Results

Uptime is monitored by two companies: Uptime Robot and StatusCake. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.

Results Table

Company Name UptimeRobot StatusCake StatusCake Avg Response Time
1&1 IONOS SE 99.999 99.99 0.62
WordPress.com Business 100 100 0.35
Cloudways 100 100 0.26
highavailability.io 100 100 0.61
Nestify 100 100 0.37
Onyx 99.998 100 0.7
Pantheon 100 100 0.09
Pressable 100 100 0.36
Seravo 100 100 0.55
Servebolt.com 99.946 99.96 0.43
SiteGround 100 99.99 0.65
WPX Hosting 100 99.99 0.25

Discussion

Everyone maintained uptime above 99.9% including with 11/12 keeping 99.99% or higher.

WebPageTest.org Results

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



Results Table

Results table can be referenced here. The radar chart does an excellent job without hiding any information.

Discussion

1&1 IONOS and Nestify stand out as the two slowest around the globe being first or second in 8/12 locales together. Onyx, the UK based company, was the fastest in London and Frankfurt, which is nice to see that geography seems to make an impact. Servebolt picked up the fastest average response time at just under a second average across the 12 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 Name PHP Bench WP Bench
1&1 IONOS SE 10.774 407.3319756
WordPress.com Business 6.255 2066.115702
Cloudways 8.486 498.2561036
highavailability.io 10.392 27.53910553
Nestify 7.486 777.6049767
Onyx 11.083 257.003341
Pantheon 9.793 273.5978112
Pressable 6.217 1375.515818
Seravo 7.926 485.2013586
Servebolt.com 2.436 2403.846154
SiteGround 7.425 1297.016861
WPX Hosting 8.389 699.3006993

Discussion

The clear standout here is Servebolt with some of the fastest times I've ever seen. WordPress.com Business isn't too far back with both of them breaking them 2000 mark on WP bench (which is more than double WordPress.com Business' score last year). The highest score in any tier last year was in 1700 range (from Servebolt and High Availability[under old IWW brand]), so this is a drastic improvement.

Qualsys SSL Report Grade

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

Results Table

Company Name Qualys SSL Report
1&1 IONOS SE A
WordPress.com Business A
Cloudways B
highavailability.io B
Nestify B
Onyx A
Pantheon A+
Pressable A
Seravo B
Servebolt.com B
SiteGround A
WPX Hosting A

Discussion

Pantheon is the only company that achieved an A+ rating. Every single B grade was for the following reason according to Qualsys: "This server supports TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. Grade capped to B."

Conclusion

 

Top Tier

HighAvailability, Nestify, Onyx, Pantheon [Reviews], Pressable, Seravo, Servebolt, SiteGround [Reviews], WordPress.com Business, and WPX Hosting all handled the tests effortlessly and earned Top Tier honors.

Honorable Mention

None.

Individual Host Analysis

1&1 IONOS [Reviews]

1&1 IONOS overall had a much stronger showing here than in the tier below. The server didn't error out on any tests. It kept excellent uptime. The only issue was Load Storm seemed to slow down the server to over 2s average load times which kept it out of earning any recognition.

Cloudways [Reviews] (Vultr 4GB)

Cloudways had perfect uptime on both monitors which was good. The problem was the load tests caused the server to slow down and have high response times.

HighAvailability

100% uptime is really nice to see. 0 Load Impact errors and a miniscule 18 errors on Load Storm wrap up an overall excellent performance, well deserving of Top Tier honors.

Nestify

A whopping 1 error across both load tests with perfect uptime easily earned Nestify Top Tier status this year.

Onyx

This UK brand (owned by Krystal Hosting) earned itself their first Top Tier honors ever. Dedicated to Managed WordPress Hosting, the new offering really showed off well with near perfect uptime of 100 and 99.998%. It was also the fastest in London and Frankfurt on WebPageTest.

Pantheon [Reviews]

Pantheon has historically done very well in these tests and this year was no exception. Perfect uptime. The absolute fastest Load Impact response time at a blazing 23ms. They were also the fastest on WebPageTest from 4/12 locales. A Top Tier performance without question.

Pressable

Perfect uptime. The second fastest average response time on Load Storm (only beat by WordPress.com Business which are both owned by Automattic). Pressable also had the second fastest PHP bench score. Well deserved on another Top Tier performance this year.

Seravo

The only truly new entrant in this price tier put on excellent showing with perfect uptime, zero errors on Load Impact and only three errors on Load Storm. Nice to see new entrant do so spectacularly and earn Top Tier status.

Servebolt

The second year for Servebolt has treated them well. They haven't missed a beat with near perfect load tests. They stood out the most on the WPPerformanceTester benchmark where they blew away the numbers from last year. Top Tier performance again.

SiteGround [Reviews]

Near perfect uptime. A total of one error on both load tests. It wasn't flashy in any of the results but it handled all the tests gracefully and earned another Top Tier mark this year.

WordPress.com Business

The other Automattic brand. It appears there may be some similarities in infrastructure with sister brand Pressable. They had similar PHP bench scores which were very fast. They also shared perfect uptime. An excellent brand to be sharing a lot in common with. WordPress.com Business stood out in having the fastest average response on Load Storm and the second fastest on Load Impact. They also had the second fastest WP bench score. Another year, another Top Tier performance well earned.

WPX Hosting

WPX Hosting had 100/99.99% uptime marks. Their average response times on both load tests was in the snappy 100ms range. WPX earned themselves Top Tier honors again this year.

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Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.

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