Category Archives: WordPress

Pantheon Review (2018)

Pantheon participated for the fourth time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). Last year Pantheon earned two Top Tier awards. This review is based off the results of this years test.

Pantheon stepped up their game this year and earned three Top Tier awards and one honorable mention. Pantheon also has the honor of being the highest rated company on Review Signal for reviews based on customer opinions (84%).

The Products

Plan Name	Plan Monthly Price	Plan Visitors Allowed	Plan Memory/RAM	Plan Disk Space	Plan Bandwidth	Plan Sites Allowed
Personal Plan	$25	10,000 (with no overage charges)	1024MB	5GB	Unlimited	1
Professional	$100	100,000	2048	20GB	Unlimited	1
Business	$400	500,000	8192	30GB	Unlimited	1
Elite	$1,667	Unlimited	Unlimited	100GB+	Unlimited	1

Performance Review

Load Storm

Plan Tier	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)
$25-50	292,393	5	220.72	162.44	4,287	162	22.79	17.5	12.66
$51-100	445,581	37	336.4	247.54	15,086	172	33.78	26.65	18.77
$200-$500	702,823	7,065	544.27	390.46	11,462	455	52.65	43.64	29.25
Enterprise	1,370,325	88	1,088.48	761.29	7,147	154	106.71	85.72	59.28

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

Pantheon overall did very well. The only issue was in the $200-500 price range it started to show signs of load. It wasn't a huge issue and the plan still earned an honorable mention in the price tier.

Load Impact

Plan Tier	Requests	Errors	Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Average Load Time (Seconds)	Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)	Peak Average Requests/Sec
$25-50	426896	0	23.73	0.159	401	880
$51-100	847397	0	47.26	0.196	773	1650
$200-$500	1257940	0	69.92	0.173	1020	2240
Enterprise	2046874	0	113.47	0.181	1660	3650

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

Pantheon aced the LoadImpact tests across every price tier. Zero errors on all four tests and maintained a sub 200 millisecond response time average. Couldn't ask for a better performance.

Uptime

Plan Tier	UptimeRobot	StatusCake
$25-50	100	100
$51-100	100	100
$200-$500	99.97	100
Enterprise	100	100

Not a whole lot to say here other than excellent. 100% uptime across the board except one monitor out of two showing 99.97%.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Plan Tier	$25-50	$51-100	$200-$500	Enterprise
Dulles	0.355	0.354	0.353	0.374
Denver	1.57	1.493	1.236	1.322
LA	0.797	0.804	0.804	0.712
London	0.448	0.446	0.45	0.474
Frankfurt	0.369	0.356	0.375	0.428
Rose Hill, Mauritius	1.093	1.074	1.088	0.912
Singapore	0.433	0.449	0.045	0.426
Mumbai	0.692	0.64	0.662	0.522
Japan	0.419	0.39	0.393	0.366
Sydney	0.528	0.503	0.516	0.497
Brazil	0.405	0.408	0.4	0.384

The WPT tests were pretty phenomenal, I rarely comment on these because it's rare a company stands out so much. Once you left the US, Pantheon was often the fastest amongst their peers. Their global coverage appears to be top notch out of the box.

Plan Tier	PHP Bench	WP Bench
$25-50	9.914	163.2120124
$51-100	9.229	276.2430939
$200-$500	8.723	294.55081
Enterprise	8.708	235.9046945

The WPPerformanceTester results were pretty consistent. Since it's supposed to be the same platform that scales up, the results looking similar seems to make sense. The slight improvement in PHP bench scores as you scale is nice, but without a lot of repeated testing, unclear if that's by design or just a happy coincidence.

Conclusion

Another year, another fabulous performance from Pantheon. Not only are they the highest rated company on Review Signal's reviews - they consistently earn top tier performance awards in our testing. They stepped up their game from last year and earned an extra Top Tier performance award and an honorable mention. Their global response times were maybe the most impressive feature. They earned fastest average response time in 3/4 tiers on Load Impact and 2/4 on Load Storm, along with often having the fastest response time in their price tiers on WebPageTest. Overall, it was a pretty impressive performance from Pantheon this year.

SiteGround Review (2018)

SiteGround participated for the fifth time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. Last year SiteGround competed in four price tiers and earned 3 Top Tier awards. This year SiteGround competed in the <$25, $25-50, and Enterprise tier.

SiteGround is one of the oldest competitors in our benchmarks and have for years now topped our reviews based on what people say on social media leading the shared category by a whopping 13% over the next highest competitor at the time of writing (Sep 2018).

The Products

Plan Name	Plan Monthly Price	Plan Visitors Allowed	Plan Disk Space	Plan Bandwidth	Plan Sites Allowed
GrowBig	$14.95	Suitable for ~ 25,000 Visits Monthly	20GB	Unmetered	Unlimited
GoGeek	$29.95	Suitable for ~ 100,000 Visits Monthly	30GB	Unmetered	Unlimited
Enterprise	$4,800	Unlimited	$1 per 1GB for distrbuted storage + shared file system	10TB	Custom

Enterprise was a custom setup: 8 servers - 2 load balancers, 4 application nodes (PHP workers) and two MySQL database servers. Every server had 16GB of RAM. The total RAM for the whole solution was 128GB RAM.

Performance Review

Load Storm

	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)
<25	316,826	14	242.02	176.01	5,361	445	21.18	16.98	11.76
25-50	317,462	16	245.1	176.37	4,569	404	21.23	17.25	11.79
Enterprise	1,443,091	15	1,151.40	801.72	15,086	209	105.15	84.68	58.42

Sources: <25, 25-50, Enterprise

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

SiteGround aced the LoadStorm tests having minimal errors across every price tier. The enterprise configuration really shined here and makes it clear the value of all the redundancy and scalabliity where it had half the average response time and handled 1.43 million requests without issue.

Load Impact

	Requests	Errors	Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Average Load Time (Seconds)	Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)	Peak Average Requests/Sec
<25	318163	4	16.97	0.556	264	605
25-50	316927	0	16.89	0.531	280	642
Enterprise	1627518	7	87.96	0.618	1370	3100

Sources: <25, 25-50, Enterprise

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

SiteGround again aced the Load Impact tests. Nearly no errors on <25 and Enterprise and zero on the 25-50 test.

Uptime

	UptimeRobot	StatusCake
<25	99.99	99.99
25-50	99	98.94
Enterprise	99.96	100

The <25 and Enterprise didn't have any uptime issues. Unfortunately the 25-50 plan ran into some issues. SiteGround issued a statement about the issue:

"The recorded downtime for the SiteGround GoGeek hosting plan during the test was not a result of actual server availability issues. The uptime is below 99.9% because during performance testing an automatic limitation system temporarily kicked in, in a way that prevented the uptime test to be properly executed. SiteGround confirmed that this particular limitation system should not have been active on the tested accounts and is currently not active on any of their production servers."

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

	PHP Bench	WP Bench
<25	10.49	1157.407407
25-50	10.44	890.4719501
Enterprise	10.457	196.6181675

The WPPerformanceTester results were average. The distributed nature of the Enterprise shows quite clearly how having redundant and scalable systems can reduce thoroughput on the WP Bench (MySQL) when you run multiple and separate database servers.

	<25	25-50	Enterprise
Dulles	0.432	0.508	0.812
Denver	1.489	1.358	1.342
LA	0.909	0.894	1.06
London	0.937	1.082	0.998
Frankfurt	1.087	1.235	0.999
Rose Hill, Mauritius	1.945	2.108	2.636
Singapore	2.088	2.564	1.908
Mumbai	1.957	2.329	2.109
Japan	1.617	1.769	1.394
Sydney	1.781	2.126	1.588
Brazil	1.392	1.565	1.187

Nothing special to say here, it performed as expected.

Conclusion

SiteGround had excellent load testing performances. Load Storm and Load Impact results were great across the board. The <25 plan also had the second fewest errors cumulatively in its price tier. The 25-50 plan looked solid except there was an uptime issue which disqualified it from earning top tier status. SiteGround's Enterprise offering was a new entry in the tier. They made quite a splash with an 8 server configuration which handled our heaviest load tests without batting an eye. It's nice to see SiteGround offering great performance at an entry level price point and being able to scale that performance up to an Enterprise grade solution.

CloudWays Review (2018)

CloudWays participated for the fourth time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. This year CloudWays participated in the 25-50, 51-100 and 201-500 price tiers.

In years past it's been interesting to see CloudWays compete with the same stack on different platforms. This year is the furthest departure from that we've seen so far. It's also the first time CloudWays has earned Top Tier status for two out of three plans that competed this year. It's also important to note, the Digital Ocean plan was originally $70 when testing started but Digital Ocean reduced their pricing causing the cost of the plan to drop dramatically to $42 hence the competing in a different tier above (51-100).

The Products

	Plan Monthly Price	Plan Visitors Allowed	Plan Memory/RAM	Plan Disk Space	Plan Bandwidth	Plan Sites Allowed
Vultr 4GB New York	$44	Unlimited	4GB	60GB SSD	3 TB	Unlimited
DigitalOcean 4GB	$42	Unlimited	4GB	80gb	4TB	unlimited
AWS EC2 - 2XL - USA N.Virginia	$495.50	Unlimited	32GB	Starts from 4GB (variable)	2GB	Unlimited

Performance Review

Load Storm

	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 AWS	770,304	822	607.12	427.95	15,083	324	52.27	42.27	29.04
CloudWays Vultr	328,015	0	249.5	182.23	7,372	360	22.27	18.55	12.37
CloudWays DO	442,424	243	331.95	245.79	15,097	1,131	30.11	21.79	16.73

Sources: AWS, Vultr, DO

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

The Vultr plan had no issue, the AWS and DO had a few errors but around 0.1% which is negligible. The big issue was Digital Ocean's response time started to increase as the load increased which knocked it out of earning Top Tier status. AWS and Vultr did great overall. With the price change, I wonder if the smaller test would have been handled better though.

Load Impact

	Requests	Errors	Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Average Load Time (Seconds)	Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)	Peak Average Requests/Sec
CloudWays AWS	1049669	0	57	0.36	908	1990
CloudWays Vultr	335275	0	18.21	0.544	278	624
CloudWays DO	457906	30	24.89	1.92	312	702

Sources: AWS, Vultr, DO.

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

AWS and Vultr handled it perfectly with zero errors. Digital Ocean had a miniscule 30 errors but an increased response time as the test went on. Great showing overall on the Load Impact test for AWS and Vultr.

Uptime

	UptimeRobot	StatusCake
CloudWays AWS	100	100
CloudWays Vultr	100	100
CloudWays DO	100	100

Perfect. Across the board, perfect uptime.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

	PHP Bench	WP Bench
CloudWays AWS	8.831	266.5955745
CloudWays Vultr	9.616	346.1405331
CloudWays DO	13.421	135.7036233

The WPPerformanceTester results are normal.

	CloudWays AWS	CloudWays Vultr	CloudWays DO
Dulles	0.312	0.33	0.328
Denver	1.137	1.305	1.101
LA	0.924	1.014	1.069
London	0.763	0.725	0.718
Frankfurt	0.816	0.785	0.819
Rose Hill, Mauritius	1.867	2.497	1.86
Singapore	2.281	2.163	2.25
Mumbai	1.65	2.287	1.646
Japan	1.578	1.613	1.573
Sydney	1.837	1.978	2.068
Brazil	1.1	1.195	1.172

The WPT tests look good. The Dulles test scores were some of the fastest, especially the CloudWays AWS server which was located in the same testing data center.

Conclusion

Hard work does pay off. CloudWays has been participating for years and continually has been improving. Two Top Tier awards for AWS and Vultr plans. The Digital Ocean plan unfortunately didn't share the same honor but it seems it was competing above its weight with a price drop that would have put it one cost tier below now.

Pressable Review (2018)

Pressable participated for the third time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. Pressable participated in the following price brackets: <$25, $51-100, $101-200, $201-500, and Enterprise.

In the previous test, Pressable earned four Top Tier status out of 5. This year Pressable earned 5/5 Top Tier awards.

The Products

Plan Name	Plan Monthly Price	Plan Visitors Allowed	Plan Disk Space	Plan Bandwidth	Plan Sites Allowed
5 Sites	$25	60,000 pageviews	unlimited	unlimited	5
20 Sites	$90	400,000 pageviews	unlimited	unlimited	20
Agency 1	$135	600,000 pageviews	unlimited	unlimited	30
Agency 3	$225	1,000,000 pageviews	unlimited	unlimited	50
VIP 2	$750.00	5 million pageviews	unlimited	Unlimited	100

Performance Review

Load Storm

	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)
<$25	330,412	487	249.85	183.56	10102	268	21.65	17.38	12.03
$51-100	475,785	1,112	371.22	264.32	10,192	318	31.17	25.48	17.32
$101-200	622,516	1,555	490.82	345.84	15,063	320	40.76	32.76	22.65
$200-$500	766,477	2,603	610.07	425.82	15,273	355	49.98	40.48	27.77
Enterprise	1,480,277	1,901	1,180.13	822.38	10,719	484	102.15	81.81	56.75

Sources: <25, 51-100, 101-200, 201-500, Enterprise

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

The error rates were a bit higher than before on Load Storm but they seemed to almost exclusively be an issue with the Tokyo testing location for Load Storm. There wasn't any other real noticeable impact, but it was a consistent minor issue in all the tests. The average response times were excellent and error rates were still under control given the Tokyo issue.

Load Impact

	Requests	Errors	Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Average Load Time (Seconds)	Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)	Peak Average Requests/Sec
<$25	326903	21	17.73	0.486	482.1	1060
$51-100	656609	3	34.75	0.443	573	1260
$101-200	979942	21	53.2	0.462	685	1900
$200-$500	977315	27	53.06	0.475	831	1820
Enterprise	1389420	0	77.63	0.773	1150	2520

Sources: <25, 51-100, 101-200, 201-500, Enterprise

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

Pressable across the board did fantastic. The enterprise level even managed a perfect run without any errors.

Uptime

	UptimeRobot	StatusCake
<$25/month	99.99	99.99
$51-100/month	99.94	100
$101-200/month	100	99.99
$200-$500/month	99.93	100
Enterprise	99.98	99.99

Overall every plan maintained above 99.9%. I'd like to see it closes to 100 than 99.9 given their past issue was uptime in the previous test, but overall they improved this year keeping every plan above 99.9% which is great.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

	PHP Bench	WP Bench
<$25/month	10.87	562.7462015
$51-100/month	10.998	556.7928731
$101-200/month	10.803	471.6981132
$200-$500/month	10.797	540.8328826
Enterprise	10.924	529.1005291

The WPPerformanceTester results were pretty uniform across all the price tiers. Given the infrastructure is shared this makes a lot of sense. You get the same performance from the lowest price to the enterprise tier.

	<$25	51-100	101-200	201-500	Enterprise
Dulles	0.468	0.479	0.474	0.495	0.563
Denver	1.366	1.334	1.384	1.315	2.261
LA	1.008	0.879	1.037	0.971	1.304
London	0.862	0.856	0.868	0.856	1.161
Frankfurt	0.947	0.923	0.881	0.863	1.334
Rose Hill, Mauritius	2.347	2.355	2.362	2.36	3.823
Singapore	2.436	2.224	2.223	2.339	3.068
Mumbai	2.59	1.828	2.558	2.555	2.447
Japan	1.698	1.733	1.748	1.579	2.106
Sydney	1.923	1.903	1.932	1.912	2.771
Brazil	1.389	1.375	1.444	1.397	1.897

The WPT tests look relatively normal. The only strange thing I noticed is that the Enterprise tier was slower in almost every case compared to the other plans. I have no idea why, could just be a timing issue when the tests were run.

Conclusion

This year Pressable stepped up their performance game just that extra bit to push all five plans into earning Top Tier status. When you're near the top it's those little gains that make all the difference. A well earned 5/5 Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance from Review Signal in 2018.

WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018)

The benchmarks are available here.

WordPress.com VIP Hosting Review (2016)

WordPress.com VIP participated for the first time in WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. They were easily the most expensive service tested, clocking in at $5,000/month. They also host some of the most popular WordPress sites on the web and being Automattic's flagship hosting product, it has some huge expectations riding on it.

Products

Company	Plan	Monthly Price	Visitors Allowed	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Sites Allowed
WordPress.com VIP	Basic	$5,000	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	5

View Full Product Details

Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Company	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)
WordPress.com VIP	4660190	8151	3726.38	2588.99	8186	101	197.82	158.29	109.9

LoadStorm test logged in thousands of users to simulate heavy uncached load on the server, scaling up with more users on larger plans after the $25-50/month range. WordPress.com VIP handled this test with minimal errors and never hitting the response timeout limit of 15000ms. In fact, it had the lowest average response time and and peak response time.

Blitz Results

Company	Hits	Errors	Timeouts	Average Hits/Second	Average Response Time	Fastest Response	Slowest Response
WordPress.com VIP	146200	0	73	2437	6	3	21

The Blitz test is designed to make sure that static assets (which should be served from cache) are being handled properly and can scale to very heavy big spikes in traffic. WordPress.com VIP had a 17ms spread and a mere 73 timeouts out of 146,2000 requests. Certainly, top tier.

Uptime

Company	StatusCake	UptimeRobot
WordPress.com VIP	100	100

Perfect.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

I mention these because they are in the full testing but I won't bother putting them here. No company had any significant issue with either and it's not worth writing about. If you're very interested in seeing the geographical response times on WPT or what the raw computing power test of WPPerformanceTester measured, read the full results.

Conclusion

WordPress.com VIP stepped into the Enterprise level of our testing and proved itself worthy and earned our Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance award. The huge expectations of being owned by the creator of WordPress, being one of the largest companies in the space and hosting some of the biggest brands in the world were met. The price for VIP is beyond what most site owners will ever likely spend, but for the few that can afford it, VIP's performance is certainly top notch.

WPOven WordPress Hosting Review (2016)

WPOven participated for the second time in WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. Last year they struggled with the LoadStorm test, but I'm happy to say that's no longer the case. They stepped up their performance including doubling the amount of memory for accounts while tests were on-going.

Products

Company	Plan	Monthly Price	Visitors Allowed	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Sites Allowed
WPOven	Personal	$39.95	Unlimited	40GB	4TB	No Limit

They made it clear to me that the products are identical until the VIP level, each site has equal resources, the only difference in plans is that more sites are allowed.

View Full Product Details

Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Company	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)
WPOven	288369	0	217.85	160.21	5815	283	16.64	13.63	9.245

LoadStorm test logged in thousands of users to simulate heavy uncached load on the server, scaling up with more users on larger plans after the $25-50/month range. WPOven had no errors this year, a marked improvement and perfect result.

Blitz Results

Company	Hits	Errors	Timeouts	Average Hits/Second	Average Response Time	Fastest Response	Slowest Response
WPOven	26687	0	0	445	103	101	104

Uptime

Company	StatusCake	UptimeRobot
WPOven	100	100

Perfect. Enough said.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

WPOven put on an absolute clinic this year. On every test they performed perfectly. A whopping zero errors across all the load tests and perfect 100% uptime. WPOven easily earned the recognition of being a Top Tier WordPress Host.

DreamHost / DreamPress WordPress Hosting Review (2016)

DreamHost participated for the third year in a row in WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. Last year, I wrote:

DreamPress improved their performance a lot over last round. In fact they did fantastically well on every load test once I got the opportunity to actually work with their engineers to bypass the security measures. However, they failed pretty badly on the uptime metrics. I have no idea what happened but I experienced a huge amount of downtime and ran into some very strange errors. If it wasn't for the severe downtime issues, DreamPress could have been in the top tier.

This year, they made even further progress and earned that Top Tier status. DreamHost also are the second highest rated shared hosting company here at Review Signal in terms of customer opinion.

Products

Company	Plan	Monthly Price	Visitors Allowed	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Sites Allowed
DreamHost	DreamPress	$19.95	Unlimited	30GB	Unlimited	1

View Full Product Details

Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Company	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)
DreamHost	295685	43	224.1	164.27	15063	339	16.06	13.5	8.922

LoadStorm test logged in thousands of users to simulate heavy uncached load on the server, scaling up with more users on larger plans after the $25-50/month range. DreamHost did exceptionally well with almost no errors and fast aerage response time.

Blitz Results

Company	Hits	Errors	Timeouts	Average Hits/Second	Average Response Time	Fastest Response	Slowest Response
DreamHost	29337	0	1	489	4	3	7

The Blitz test is designed to make sure that static assets (which should be served from cache) are being handled properly and can scale to very heavy big spikes in traffic. If the LoadStorm test was a clinic, this was absolute perfection. DreamHost was near perfect with a ridiculously quick 4ms average response time (which is likely due to being physically close to the testing server) and 4ms spread which is excellent.

Uptime

Company	StatusCake	UptimeRobot
DreamHost	99.97	99.97

Not much to say here beyond DreamHost had good uptime at 99.97%.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

DreamHost continues to step up their performance game. Last year, a severe uptime issue knocked them out of earning awards. This year, there were no such problems. They handled every test near flawlessly and earned themselves a Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance award. I always am happy to see companies continually improve their performance. It's good for the space to have another strong competitor at the entry level price range.

Pantheon WordPress Hosting Review (2016)

Pantheon participated for the third time in WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. They've done well in the past earning top tier status in both previous tests. This year they had four plans entered into the following ranges: $25-50/month, $51-100/month, $201-500/month and Enterprise ($500+/month).

Products

Company	Plan	Monthly Price	Visitors Allowed	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Sites Allowed
Pantheon 25-50	Personal	$25	10,000	5GB	Unlimited	1
Pantheon 51-100	Professional	$100	100,000	20GB	Unlimited	1
Pantheon 201-500	Business	$400	500,000	30GB	Unlimited	1
Pantheon Enterprise	Elite	$1,666.66	Unlimited	100GB+	Unlimited	Priced Per Site

View Full Product Details

Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Company	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)
Pantheon 25-50	268164	866	205.5	148.98	14422	315	6466	4.927	3.592
Pantheon 51-100	409962	57051	325.53	227.76	11682	762	20.74	17.97	11.52
Pantheon 201-500	629578	49212	510.78	349.77	15091	1353	33.88	28.9	18.82
Pantheon Enterprise	1295178	9964	1014.58	719.54	15101	786	30.86	24.18	17.15

LoadStorm test logged in thousands of users to simulate heavy uncached load on the server, scaling up with more users on larger plans after the $25-50/month range. Pantheon did well at the entry level and the enterprise level. The 51-100 and 201-500 range the load exceeded the capacity of the containers hosting the sites. Pantheon showed they definitely can scale at the Enterprise level, but some of the mid-range of their lineup struggled to keep up with our tests.

Blitz Results

Company	Hits	Errors	Timeouts	Average Hits/Second	Average Response Time	Fastest Response	Slowest Response
Pantheon 25-50	27755	0	0	463	61	60	67
Pantheon 51-100	55499	0	0	925	61	60	64
Pantheon 201-500	83211	2	0	1387	61	61	68
Pantheon Enterprise	138607	4	27	2310	62	60	80

The Blitz test is designed to make sure that static assets (which should be served from cache) are being handled properly and can scale to very heavy big spikes in traffic. If the LoadStorm test was a clinic, this was absolute perfection. Pantheon had no issue with the Blitz tests at any level with near perfect results across every tier.

Uptime

Company	StatusCake	UptimeRobot
Pantheon 25-50	100	100
Pantheon 51-100	100	100
Pantheon 201-500	99.98	99.98

2/3 were perfect and the third was 99.98%. Pantheon did excellent in the uptime department.

Uptime wasn't tracked on most Enterprise level plans because they are just so expensive that it felt wasteful to run them for a long period doing nothing but monitoring uptime if the company had other plans in the testing which could also be measured.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

Pantheon earned two Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance awards this year, for their entry level Personal plan and their Enterprise level plan. They definitely can scale for enormous sites and compete with the biggest companies in the space. The only place they struggled this year was the mid-range of their offerings during the LoadStorm test. It's by far the most stressful test and the $201-500 range was the most difficult price/performance point of any of the price brackets. Pantheon has a very unique platform compared to the rest of the field that's exceptionally developer-centric and focused around building a toolkit for teams of developers to work on a site in an opinionated workflow. If you like that workflow, you get an amazing toolkit combined with scalable performance.

LiquidWeb WordPress Hosting Review (2016)

LiquidWeb was a first time participant in WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. They have been around for a long time in the managed web hosting space but only recently entered the WordPress space. They have consistently been one of the top companies tracked at Review Signal winning numerous awards for their shared and VPS hosting.

Those are some pretty big expectations to meet when you enter a space that is already full of many competitors and being the new kid on the block. The only other first time participant that did as well was WordPress.com VIP, which isn't a new entrant into the space, but only this testing.

Products

Company / Price Bracket	Plan	Monthly Price	Visitors Allowed	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Sites Allowed
LiquidWeb 51-100	Personal	$89	Unlimited	100GB SSD	5 TB	10
LiquidWeb 101-200	Professional	$149	Unlimited	150GB SSD	5 TB	20

View Full Product Details

Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Company / Price Bracket	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)
LiquidWeb 51-100	520072	2745	408.3	288.93	15322	525	24.04	19.69	13.35
LiquidWeb 101-200	635893	76	490.78	353.27	15097	360	31.3	25.19	17.39

LoadStorm test logged in thousands of users to simulate heavy uncached load on the server, scaling up with more users on larger plans after the $25-50/month range. LiquidWeb handled these tests with relative ease. The larger plan did better managing a faster average response time and having fewer errors. But both results were top tier performances.

Blitz Results

Company / Price Bracket	Hits	Errors	Timeouts	Average Hits/Second	Average Response Time	Fastest Response	Slowest Response
LiquidWeb 51-100	54574	0	4	910	78	77	82
LiquidWeb 101-200	81393	47	10	1357	80	76	118

The Blitz test is designed to make sure that static assets (which should be served from cache) are being handled properly and can scale to very heavy big spikes in traffic. If the LoadStorm test was a clinic, this was absolute perfection. LiquidWeb had minimal issues with the Blitz test. A very minor spike up to 118ms on the bigger test is the only noticeable thing. Again, top tier performances.

Uptime

Company	StatusCake	UptimeRobot
LiquidWeb 51-100	100	100
LiquidWeb 101-200	100	100

Perfect.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

LiquidWeb earned Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance for both plans it entered. It's product line starts in the mid-range price wise and goes up. They definitely have the performance to match the pricing. Absolutely perfect uptime was nice to see too. I'm pleased to see they bring their strong reputation to this market with a strong product that matches the quality people have come to expect from LiquidWeb.

The Products

Performance Review

Load Storm

Load Impact

Uptime

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

The Products

Performance Review

Load Storm

Load Impact

Uptime

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

The Products

Performance Review

Load Storm

Load Impact

Uptime

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

The Products

Performance Review

Load Storm

Load Impact

Uptime

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

Products

Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Blitz Results

Uptime

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

Products

Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Blitz Results

Uptime

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

Products

Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Blitz Results

Uptime

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

Products

Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Blitz Results

Uptime

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

Products

Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Blitz Results

Uptime

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Conclusion

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