$51-100/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 $51-100/month price bracket for WordPress Hosting.

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)
A2 Hosting 502,905 296 417.78 279.39 15,104 753 29 22 16
Cloudways 475,370 0 394.27 264.09 8,848 786 28.26 21 16
DreamHost 519,329 338 566.62 288.52 15,180 689 28.29 26 16
Incendia Web Works 525,677 0 426.30 292.04 7,314 564 32.18 27 18
Kinsta 535,858 105 408.67 297.70 2,372 440 32.83 25 18
Lightning Base 543,591 74 403.62 302.00 15,101 654 32.64 24 18
Liquid Web 502,825 0 385.33 279.35 6,397 728 30.35 23 17
Pressable 618,543 32 472.27 343.63 5,611 425 34.07 26 19
Servebolt.com 838,083 26 637.12 465.60 6,456 97 32.06 25 18
WPX Hosting 585,724 637 534.75 325.40 15,102 221 33.8 36 19

Discussion

IWW, Kinsta, LightningBase, Pressable, Servebolt, and WPX Hosting all handled the Load Storm test without issue.

A2 Hosting [Reviews] and DreamHost [Reviews] showed increased response times and error rates as the test scaled.

Cloudways [Reviews] and LiquidWeb [Reviews] showed increased response times as the test scaled but no errors.

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
A2 Hosting 378227 76 20.67 4330 235 526
Cloudways 513214 0 28.7 1210 413 903
DreamHost 561713 0 31.35 1110 486 1040
Incendia Web Works 595361 0 32.97 685 573 1230
Kinsta 602521 0 33.49 608 571 1220
Lightning Base 604400 0 34.1 629 557 1180
Liquid Web 322836 1 18.13 3660 198 431
Pressable 563149 0 32.04 724 542 1140
Servebolt.com 760656 34 41.59 619 741 1570
WPX Hosting 847119 2 46.84 242 785 1690

Discussion

IWW, Kinsta, LightningBase, Pressable, Servebolt, and WPX Hosting all handled the Load Impact test without issue.

A2 Hosting, Cloudways, DreamHost and LiquidWeb all had increased response times during the Load Impact test.

Uptime Monitoring Results

Results Table

Company Name UptimeRobot StatusCake StatusCake Avg Response Time
A2 Hosting 99.833 99.85% 0.550s
Cloudways 100 100% 0.546s
DreamHost 99.866 99.79% 0.482s
Incendia Web Works 98.487 100% 0.444s
Kinsta 100 100% 0.519s
Lightning Base 100 100% 0.420s
Liquid Web 99.989 99.99% 0.486s
Pressable 100 99.96% 0.700s
Servebolt.com 100 100% 0.318s
WPX Hosting 100 100% 0.257s

Discussion

A2 Hosting and DreamHost's uptime fell below 99.9%.

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
A2 Hosting 0.5 0.82 1.059 0.929 1.09 2.758
Cloudways 0.693 1.035 0.783 1.095 1.282 2.542
DreamHost 0.432 1.164 0.895 0.788 0.891 2.84
Incendia Web Works 0.393 0.794 0.807 0.717 0.938 2.469
Kinsta 0.522 1.019 0.789 0.983 1.049 2.257
Lightning Base 0.514 0.757 0.959 0.901 0.96 2.042
Liquid Web 0.545 0.999 0.929 0.895 1.103 2.275
Pressable 0.604 1.755 2.056 1.212 1.257 3.848
Servebolt.com 0.469 1.896 1.187 0.727 0.806 2.156
WPX Hosting 0.434 0.839 0.807 0.379 1.282 2.862

 

Company Name WPT Singapore WPT Mumbai WPT Japan WPT Sydney WPT Brazil
A2 Hosting 2.46 2.308 1.657 2.795 1.466
Cloudways 1.388 1.899 1.121 1.492 1.477
DreamHost 2.073 2.379 1.648 2.38 1.099
Incendia Web Works 1.856 1.963 1.273 1.869 1.1
Kinsta 1.696 2.034 1.228 1.632 1.334
Lightning Base 1.511 1.764 1.148 1.38 1.16
Liquid Web 1.836 1.743 1.203 1.781 1.229
Pressable 3.081 2.683 2.113 2.655 2.177
Servebolt.com 1.388 1.672 1.146 1.414 1.128
WPX Hosting 1.638 4.081 1.347 2.3 1.865

Discussion

There was no clear fastest as it was very tightly clustered in most locales.

Pressable was the slowest in 6/11 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
A2 Hosting 11.083 1386.962552
Cloudways 12.931 494.8045522
DreamHost 16.962 703.7297678
Incendia Web Works 6.647 1706.484642
Kinsta 10.688 1054.852321
Lightning Base 9.07 1126.126126
Liquid Web 6.438 1112.347052
Pressable 11.129 396.3535474
Servebolt.com 3.809 1680.672269
WPX Hosting 7.782 973.7098345

Discussion

Servebolt.com had an incredibly fast PHP Bench and IWW had an incredibly fast WP Bench.

Qualsys SSL Report Grade

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

Results Table

Company Name Qualys SSL Report
A2 Hosting A
Cloudways A
DreamHost A
Incendia Web Works A+
Kinsta A
Lightning Base A
Liquid Web A
Pressable A
Servebolt.com A+
WPX Hosting A

Discussion

Everyone gets an A. IWW and Servebolt get A+.

Conclusion

Top Tier

Kinsta, LightningBase, Pressable, Servebolt and WPX Hosting all earned Top Tier status this year. They each handled all the tests flawlessly.

Honorable Mention

No companies earned honorable mention status.

Individual Host Analysis

A2 Hosting [Reviews]

A2 Hosting didn't crash on either load test which was nice. Unfortunately, the load did slow the server down and caused high average response times as the tests progressed. The uptime also was below 99.9%. A2 Hosting has had better performances in the past, there's definitely still room for improvement.

Cloudways [Reviews]

Cloudways perfect on the uptime monitors with a double 100%. The load tests showed signs of load as both tests progressed, the server never failed, but response times increased substantially. It was a good performance but just out of honorable mention territory.

DreamHost [Reviews]

DreamHost handled both load tests without failing but the results became spikey and showed increased response times towards the end of each. The big problem was the uptime fell below 99.9%.

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

Perfect 100% uptime on both monitors, and excellent load testing results put Kinsta in the Top Tier yet again. Just a model of consistent high performance.

LightningBase

LightningBase had excellent load testing results, again. They also had perfect uptime on both monitors. Top Tier status earned for sure.

LiquidWeb [Reviews]

One error total from both load tests. 99.99% uptime. There is a lot to like, but Liquid Web's servers couldn't quite keep up the fast response times expected during the load tests. They never failed, but they did start to slow down and that kept them from earning any recognition.

Pressable

Pressable put on an excellent showing with 100% and 99.96% uptime. The load tests had a total of 32 errors combined. Pressable easily earned itself a Top Tier award this year.

Servebolt.com

New entrant Servebolt.com stormed into the tests this year and earned itself a Top Tier award. They had perfect 100% uptime on both monitors. They also had the fastest Load Storm results of any company in this price tier. It was an excellent performance from a new entrant.

WPX Hosting

WPX Hosting's most expensive plan entered this year also earned them a hat trick. Three for three on earning Top Tier recognition. Perfect uptime. The fastest Load Impact response times and second fastest Load Storm response times. Overall, an fantastic job from WPX Hosting.

 

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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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