$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.

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.

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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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