$51-100/Month WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018)

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 $51-100/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 the table below to see the full product specifications sheet.

Load Storm Testing Results

This test scaled from 500 to 3000 users over 30 minutes with 10 minutes at the peak.

Results Table

	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 DO	442424	243	331.95	245.79	15097	1131	30.11	21.79	16.73
Kinsta	425597	1	332.65	236.44	10017	377	30.98	25.62	17.21
Nestify	391561	12270	312.58	217.53	16016	1817	23.29	17.12	12.94
Pantheon	445581	37	336.4	247.54	15086	172	33.78	26.65	18.77
Pressable	475785	1112	371.22	264.32	10192	318	31.17	25.48	17.32
WPOven INC	438758	1	342.95	243.75	10051	370	30.96	25.71	17.2

Discussion

Kinsta, Pantheon [Reviews], and WPOven handled this test without issue. Pressable had nearly all errors from Tokyo again. A strange issue but a minor one.

CloudWays [Reviews] DO experienced increased response times to 1000ms.

Nestify experienced increased response times and errors.

Load Impact Testing Results

This test scaled from 1 to 2000 users over 15 minutes. Error count capped at 5,000.

Results Table

	Requests	Errors	Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Average Load Time (Seconds)	Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)	Peak Average Requests/Sec
CloudWays DO	457906	30	24.89	1.92	312	702
Kinsta	672240	0	36	0.416	583	1300
Nestify	223074	806	11.81	8.03	116	269
Pantheon	847397	0	47.26	0.196	773	1650
Pressable	656609	3	34.75	0.443	573	1260
WPOven INC	675881	0	36.07	0.398	619	1380

Discussion

Kinsta, Pantheon [Reviews], Pressable, and WPOven handled this test without issue.

CloudWays [Reviews] DO started showing signs of load with significantly increasing response times.

Nestify had a 100 Mbps network limit that was hit and caused increased response times and errors.

Uptime Monitoring Results

Results Table

	UptimeRobot	StatusCake
CloudWays DO	100	100
Kinsta	100	100
Nestify	99.9	99.93
Pantheon	100	100
Pressable	99.94	100
WPOven INC	99.98	99.97

Discussion

All companies kept great uptime (>=99.9%).

WebPageTest.org Results

Results Table

	WPT Dulles	WPT Denver	WPT LA	WPT London	WPT Frankfurt	WPT Rose Hill, Mauritius
CloudWays DO	0.328	1.101	1.069	0.718	0.819	1.86
Kinsta	0.373	1.163	0.79	1.104	1.009	2.446
Nestify	0.339	1.244	1.14	0.775	0.917	2.837
Pantheon	0.354	1.493	0.804	0.446	0.356	1.074
Pressable	0.479	1.334	0.879	0.856	0.923	2.355
WPOven INC	0.406	1.118	0.739	1.124	1.206	2.04

	WPT Singapore	WPT Mumbai	WPT Japan	WPT Sydney	WPT Brazil
CloudWays DO	2.25	1.646	1.573	2.068	1.172
Kinsta	1.729	2.279	1.183	1.766	1.364
Nestify	2.444	2.525	1.737	2.271	1.299
Pantheon	0.449	0.64	0.39	0.503	0.408
Pressable	2.224	1.828	1.733	1.903	1.375
WPOven INC	2.103	2.221	1.421	2.099	1.316

Discussion

There isn't a whole lot to say since this is a non-impacting metric in terms of the results. Nobody had huge issues.

I looked at the aggregate change again for the locations which were similar. There were 12 companies last year in this price bracket and only six this year. Across the nine same locations used, there was a cumulative decrease in response time of 3.14 seconds. For instance, Dulles dropped from 0.80 to 0.38 seconds on average.

WPPerformanceTester Results

Results Table

	PHP Bench	WP Bench
CloudWays DO	13.421	135.7036233
Kinsta	8.783	1173.70892
Nestify	11.8	136.3884343
Pantheon	9.229	276.2430939
Pressable	10.998	556.7928731
WPOven INC	9.634	211.1040743

Discussion

Kinsta had the fastest PHP bench and WP bench.

The average PHP bench went from 11.00 to 10.64 from the 2016 benchmarks in this price tier. The average WP bench went from 505 to 414. We saw the PHP bench improve slightly but the WP bench decrease a lot.

One thing to note is that WP bench scores can vary tremendously based on the database architecture. You'll often see faster scores on architectures running the database locally compared to ones that run separately or have redundancy built in.

Conclusion

Top Tier

Kinsta, Pantheon [Reviews], Pressable, and WPOven all earned Top Tier status this year for going through all the tests without any significant issues.

Honorable Mention

None.

Individual Host Analysis

CloudWays Digital Ocean

CloudWays [Reviews] DO had perfect uptime at 100%. But both load tests started to show signs of load with increased response times going into the multiple second range with a classic increased response time as load increases. I should also note this plan cost $70 when the testing occurred but Digital Ocean has reduced their pricing and this plan now costs $42.

Kinsta

Kinsta had 1 error between both load tests and 100% uptime. Nearly made that perfect score. Another Top Tier performance.

Nestify

Nestify had good uptime. But the load tests weren't kind. LoadImpact hit the same 100 Mbps limit as it did at other price tier. Load Storm seemed to cause a little too much load for the server to handle as well.

Pantheon

Pantheon [Reviews] earned top tier status again with 100% uptime and near perfect load tests.

Pressable

Pressable continued to have the weird Tokyo datacenter quirk for Load Storm. But beyond that the performance was near perfect. Another Top Tier performance.

WP Oven

Another repeat Top Tier performance from WPOven. Nobody seems to be paying attention to these guys, not sure why. Good uptime, 1 cumulative error on the load tests. Great job.