$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.

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)
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.