WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2020) - $201-500/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 $201-500/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

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)
Cloudways	606,481	0 (0%)	521	336.93	3,760.00	340.00	35	30	19
Jelastic, Inc	1,153,090	928 (0.08%)	900	641	15,315	124.00	61.27	48	34
Nestify	848,046	0 (0%)	668.7	471.14	4,214.00	469	52.14	41.48	29
Pressable	972,232	22 (0%)	708	540	12,405	1,086.00	49.91	37	28
RAIDBOXES	1,003,451	0 (0%)	773.97	557.47	10,728	505	53.05	41.11	29.47
Servebolt.com	1,381,129	42 (0%)	1,090	767	15,099	47.00	50.95	40	28

Full interactive results can be referenced here.

Discussion

Cloudways [Reviews], Jelastic, Nestify, Raidboxes and Servebolt all handled this test without issue.

Pressable saw a slight increase in response times from 500 to 1200ms.

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
Cloudways	1162068	15	65.5	1100	959.03	2030
Jelastic, Inc	1696819	7	91.81	97	1310	2950
Nestify	1003582	0	56.07	1490	731.14	1560
Pressable	1768926	0	99.61	40	1460	3170
RAIDBOXES	1142240	0	63.19	769	1010	2240
Servebolt.com	1420760	0	77.36	213	1070	2400

Full interactive results can be referenced here.

Discussion

Jelastic, Pressable, Raidboxes and Servebolt all handled the Load Impact test without issue.

Cloudways started to slow down around 3250 users and peak average response time increased to 1100.

Nestify started to slow down around 2500 users and peak average response time went to almost 1500ms.

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	Custom Uptime Monitor
Cloudways	100	100	0.21
Jelastic, Inc	98.587	99.99	0.23	98.56
Nestify	100	100	0.65
Pressable	100	100	0.25
RAIDBOXES	99.999	100	0.37
Servebolt.com	99.583	99.99	0.43	99.98

Discussion

Cloudways, Nestify, Pressable, and Raidboxes had perfect or 99.999% uptime.

Jelastic had very different uptimes based on the monitors with UptimeRobot showing 98.587% and StatusCake showing 99.99%. The third monitor showed 98.56% which was inline with UptimeRobot, so I went with that being correct.

Servebolt also had a discrepancy between UptimeRobot and StatusCake uptime. One showed a very low 99.583 and the other 99.99. The third monitor I setup showed 99.98%, so I went with the StatusCake number.

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

Servebolt was the fastest in 7/12 locations and had the fastest average response time. Jelastic was the slowest in 7/12 and fastest in 1. Nestify was the slowest in 5/12.

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
Cloudways	7.538	689.1798759
Jelastic, Inc	7.649	1213.592233
Nestify	7.486	742.9420505
Pressable	6.215	1367.989056
RAIDBOXES	5.644	938.0863039
Servebolt.com	3.281	1992.031873

Discussion

The speed on this test was impressive. Servebolt was clearly the fastest on both tests but the numbers were an astonishing improvement over last year. The second fastest score last year on PHP Bench was 9.388 and the slowest this year was 7.649, nearly a two second improvement. Some of this could be because there are a different mix of companies but three of them are the same. Servebolt got faster by ~500ms and ~500 queries per second. Pressable improved by 4000ms and 900 queries per second. Cloudways improved by 1900ms and 260 queries per second. It's nice to see continuous improvements being made across the board.

Qualsys SSL Report Grade

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

Results Table

Company Name	Qualys SSL Report
Cloudways	B
Jelastic, Inc	A
Nestify	B
Pressable	A
RAIDBOXES	A+
Servebolt.com	B

Discussion

Raidboxes was the only company to achieve 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

Raidboxes and Servebolt stood out and earned Top Tier honors. Both companies handled these tests effortlessly.

Honorable Mention

Cloudways [Reviews] earned an Honorable Mention because they had a minor slow down towards the end of the Load Impact test.

Individual Host Analysis

Cloudways [Reviews] (AWS - 2XL)

Overall a very good performance from Cloudways. Perfect uptime. Improved speeds from last years WPPerformanceTester results. Just a minor slow down during Load Impact kept them from earning Top Tier honors.

Jelastic

Excellent performance from this new comer except for the uptime issue. They didn't have this issue in other tiers, so I am optimistic next year they will earn Top Tier status.

Nestify

Nestify had perfect uptime. A perfect looking Load Storm test with zero errors and flat response times. The only issue was Load Impact slowed down starting around 2300 users and kept climbing upwards to around 1.5s average response time. Very borderline on earning an Honorable Mention, just a bit better next year will earn some them recognition.

Pressable

Pressable had perfect uptime and Load Impact test. In fact, they had the fastest peak average response time of any company in this price tier. The only issue was Load Storm caused some increased response times with it slowly climbing to over 1300ms at points. It was borderline on the honorable mention, but the response times went a bit too high. A little better and Pressable would be earning honors at this tier.

Raidboxes

One of the standout new entrants this year earned Top Tier status right off the bat. 99.999% uptime and up. Zero errors on both load tests. Hard to ask for a better performance, but they also had the fastest PHP bench score of a company not named Servebolt across any price tier. Well done Raidboxes and congrats on the Top Tier marks.

Servebolt

Speed, speed, speed. Servebolt had the fastest response times on Load Storm and WebPageTest. They also were in a class of their own on WPPerformanceTester. The Top Tier status was well deserved for Servebolt.