Tag Archives: blitz

Kinsta WordPress Hosting Review

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This post is based off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2014).

 

Overview

Kinsta is yet another new comer in our testing with something to prove. Kinsta easily shot to the top of our performance charts. Kinsta's plans have changed quite a bit since we tested them. When our testing was done they offered a $27/month plan. However, they've gone up-market and their cheapest plan is now $157/month. It seems they're targeting people who want serious performance.

The Plan

All testing was done on a shared account, which is no longer available.  This plan tested had 1 WordPress site, 1GB SSD disk space, 50GB bandwidth and costs $27/month.

Performance

LoadStorm

The first performance test was done with LoadStorm. Kinsta made it to the final round of testing where 2000 concurrent users were logging into WordPress and browsing the test site. The test was designed to test non-cached performance by logging users into WordPress. It caused many hosting setups to crumble. You can see Kinsta's result in this graph (click on it to play with the interactive results):

Load-Storm-Kinsta-2000

 

Kinsta aced the LoadStorm test. It had zero errors and one of the fastest average response times at 316ms. Kinsta also had the absolute lowest peak response time at 942ms. That's an astonishing feat, that over 30 minutes Kinsta served nearly 250,000 requests and not a single one took over a second to be delivered. Amazing.

Blitz

The second load test that was run on Kinsta was Blitz. Blitz was used to test cached performance. It simply requested the home page from 1-2000 times per second.

Blitz-Kinsta-2000

I can't draw lines this straight. The response time was flat. As you would expect from a company that aced the cache busting test, they didn't struggle in the slightest. Full Blitz Results (PDF)

Uptime

Two third-party uptime monitoring services (StatusCake and UptimeRobot) tracked the test site for a month. The results for Kinsta were perfect. 100% uptime according to both sources.

WebPageTest

“WebPagetest is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of our efforts to make the web faster.” WebPageTest grades performance and allows you to run tests from multiple locations simulating real users. Kinsta was tested from Dulles, VA, Miami, FL, Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA.

Company Dulles,VA Miami, FL Denver, CO Los Angeles, CA Average
Kinsta 0.759 0.752 0.947 0.592 0.7625

Kinsta had the second fastest average response time of all the companies we tested. No issues with this test in the slightest.

Conclusion

Kinsta, a new-comer to our testing, jumped straight to the top of the performance tiers. Kinsta’s performance was amazing in the Load Storm 2000 logged in user test. They had the lowest peak response time and zero errors over a 30 minute test. They didn’t struggle with any tests whatsoever and showed zero downtime. Kinsta’s performance was undoubtedly top tier.

Visit Kinsta

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WebSynthesis WordPress Hosting Review

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This post is based off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2014).

 

Overview

WebSynthesis [Reviews] had an extremely strong showing in our first round of testing once I got by a security issue. They managed to defend their status as a top tier WordPress web host.

The Plan

All testing was done on a VPS account. The plan tested had 2 GB ram, 40 GB disk space, 650 GB bandwidth, 20,000 visitors/day and costs $97/month.

Performance

LoadStorm

The first performance test was done with LoadStorm. WebSynthesis made it to the final round of testing where 2000 concurrent users were logging into WordPress and browsing the test site. The test was designed to test non-cached performance by logging users into WordPress. It caused many hosting setups to crumble. You can see WebSynthesis's result in this graph (click on it to play with the interactive results):

Load-Storm-WebSynthesis-2000

 

WebSynthesis stayed under the threshold of 0.5% error rate, but it was close. This grueling 2000 user test really put a strain on the server as you can see from the spikes but it held for 30 minutes without failing.

Blitz

The second load test that was run on WebSynthesis was Blitz. Blitz was used to test cached performance. It simply requested the home page from 1-2000 times per second.

Blitz-WebSynthesis-2000

WebSynthesis was better than flat. There is a slight downward trend in response time. WebSynthesis led the pack, again, delivering 57,776 hits in one minute with a single error. The best results of anyone on this test. Full Blitz Results (PDF)

Uptime

Two third-party uptime monitoring services (StatusCake and UptimeRobot) tracked the test site for a month. The results for WebSynthesis were 100% uptime according to both sources, again.

WebPageTest

“WebPagetest is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of our efforts to make the web faster.” WebPageTest grades performance and allows you to run tests from multiple locations simulating real users. WebSynthesis was tested from Dulles, VA, Miami, FL, Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA.

Company Dulles,VA Miami, FL Denver, CO Los Angeles, CA Average
WebSynthesis 0.407 0.835 0.982 1.024 0.7812

WebSynthesis handled this test fine. In fact, they had the single fastest average page load from a single location of any company at 0.407 seconds from Dulles, VA.

Conclusion

WebSynthesis [Reviews] was teetering on the Load Storm test of having too many errors (0.5%), but they were under it and handled the test quite well. They also had no weird security issues this time around, and WebSynthesis led the pack on Blitz testing. They went from 871 hits/second last time to 963 hits/second this time; leading every provider on the Blitz tests with a whopping 1 error to boot. Sprinkle in some perfect up time numbers and it’s clear WebSynthesis is still a top tier provider and is continuing to get better.

Visit WebSynthesis

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Pagely WordPress Hosting Review

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This post is based off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2014).

 

Overview

Pagely came in with a title to defend. Pagely was one of the top tier web hosts in our first round of testing and didn't show any signs of struggling. My biggest complaint was SFTP was an addon, which they now include with every account. Performance-wise Pagely was back at it again with another top tier performance.

The Plan

All testing was done on a shared account, the Personal / Business plan.  This plan allows for 1 WordPress site, 5GB disk space, 10GB bandwidth and costs $24/month.

Performance

LoadStorm

The first performance test was done with LoadStorm. Pagely made it to the final round of testing where 2000 concurrent users were logging into WordPress and browsing the test site. The test was designed to test non-cached performance by logging users into WordPress. It caused many hosting setups to crumble. You can see Pagely's result in this graph (click on it to play with the interactive results):

Load-Storm-Pagely-2000

 

Pagely did well on this test. There was one error total which caused a response time spike (blue line in the graph). Other than a single error, the performance was impeccable.

Blitz

The second load test that was run on Pagely was Blitz. Blitz was used to test cached performance. It simply requested the home page from 1-2000 times per second.

Blitz-Pagely-2000

Pagely's Blitz result was exemplary. There were 43 timeouts and errors combined. There was a near flat response time which means it had no issues at all. Pagely didn't blink at this test, as expected based on their performance last time on this test. Full Blitz Results (PDF)

Uptime

Two third-party uptime monitoring services (StatusCake and UptimeRobot) tracked the test site for a month. The results for Pagely were 99.95% and 100% uptime. It's hard to complain about those numbers or find any issue with Pagely's uptime.

WebPageTest

“WebPagetest is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of our efforts to make the web faster.” WebPageTest grades performance and allows you to run tests from multiple locations simulating real users. Pagely was tested from Dulles, VA, Miami, FL, Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA.

Company Dulles,VA Miami, FL Denver, CO Los Angeles, CA Average
Pagely 6.831 0.86 0.913 0.709 2.32825

Pagely was the only company that had any issue with the WebPageTest component of our testing. The test from Dulles had bizarrely high load times for no explicable reason. The other locations were all sub one second, so I dismissed it as a real issue because it's likely some fluke networking issue. But there was a weird networking issue.

Conclusion

Pagely easily defended its title as one of the top tier WordPress hosts. They handled the Load Storm test with 1 error. Blitz results stayed similar to the last run. They handled more hits, but had a few more errors+timeouts (1 last time, 43 this time). If performance is the name of the game, Pagely continues to be at the forefront.

Visit Pagely

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LightningBase WordPress Hosting Review

lightningbaselogo1600x290bThis post is based off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2014).

 

Overview

LightningBase was a new comer to our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. Lightning Base's founder, Chris Piepho, was incredibly helpful giving feedback on how the testing in Round 1 was done. His feedback played a bit part in the differences you see in Round 2, namely, cache busting. So it's without a large surprise that someone that cares so deeply about performance that their own service did remarkably well in our testing.

The Plan

All testing was done on a shared account, the Personal plan.  The personal plan allows for 1 WordPress site, 10,000 visits/month, 1GB SSD disk space, 10GB bandwidth, 20GB CDN and costs $9.95/month.

Performance

LoadStorm

The first performance test was done with LoadStorm. LightningBase made it to the final round of testing where 2000 concurrent users were logging into WordPress and browsing the test site. The test was designed to test non-cached performance by logging users into WordPress. It caused many hosting setups to crumble. You can see LightningBase's result in this graph (click on it to play with the interactive results):

 

Load-Storm-Lightning-Base-2000

LightningBase handled the test with minimal errors (23) and showed minimal signs of struggling with the load. There appears to be a bit of delay every so often that looks like a cache update. Other than that minor detail it looks excellent.

Blitz

The second load test that was run on LightningBase was Blitz. Blitz was used to test cached performance. It simply requested the home page from 1-2000 times per second.

Blitz-LightningBase-2000

LightningBase's Blitz result looks textbook. There were no errors and no timeouts. There was a near flat response time which means it had no issues at all. LightningBase aced our Blitz testing. Full Blitz Results (PDF)

Uptime

Two third-party uptime monitoring services (StatusCake and UptimeRobot) tracked the test site for a month. The results for LightningBase in both cases was perfect uptime. In the uptime department, LightningBase had a flawless performance.

WebPageTest

“WebPagetest is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of our efforts to make the web faster.” WebPageTest grades performance and allows you to run tests from multiple locations simulating real users. LightningBase was tested from Dulles, VA, Miami, FL, Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA.

Company Dulles,VA Miami, FL Denver, CO Los Angeles, CA Average
LightningBase 0.584 0.787 0.936 0.675 0.7455

There was absolutely no issues with their WebPageTest results. LightningBase had the fastest average load time of every host compared in our testing.

Conclusion

LightningBase is another new-comer that jumped straight to the top. One of the cheapest too starting at under $10 per month. LightningBase aced the Blitz testing and did excellent on Load Storm tests. There was zero downtime monitored. LightningBase belongs in the top tier of WordPress hosting companies and is delivering amazing value on top of their stellar performance benchmarks.

Visit Lightning Base

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Media Temple WordPress Hosting Review

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This post is based off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks, where you can read the full details of how Media Temple performed against the competition.

Overview

MediaTemple [Reviews] is a new entrant into the managed WordPress hosting space along with its parent brand GoDaddy. It was acquired by GoDaddy in 2013 and both have jumped head first into the WordPress space sharing a lot of technology. Media Temple has a generally more positive reputation than its parent company and targets developers and designers with a premium offering. MT wasn't in our first round of testing but they did very well in our second round of testing. Media Temple also recently changed their plans and pricing structure, offering plans that scale much higher than the one size fits all plan originally offered. The plan used during our testing was more expensive and had a slightly fewer features. So it seems new customers would get slightly better value and the ability to scale.

The Plan

All testing was done on Media Temple's WordPress hosting package. The plan had 20GB of SSD disk space, unlimited bandwidth usage, allowed 3 sites and had Git and Staging technology. The cost was $29/month.

Performance

LoadStorm

The first performance test was done with LoadStorm. Media Temple made it to the final round of testing where 2000 concurrent users were logging into WordPress and browsing the test site. The test was designed to test non-cached performance by logging users into WordPress. It caused many hosting setups to crumble. You can see MT's result in this graph (click on it to play with the interactive results):

 

Load-Storm-Media-Temple-2000

Media Temple handled this test barely showing signs of struggle. A staggering low error count of 9 (out of more than 249,000 requests)  one of the lowest peak response times at under 1.5 seconds.

Blitz

The second load test that was run on Media Temple was Blitz. Blitz was used to test cached performance. It simply requested the home page from 1-2000 times per second.

Blitz-Media-Temple-2000

Media Temple's Blitz results were near textbook. Flat response times while users scaled to 2000 and a <0.1% error+timeout rate. Full Blitz Results (PDF)

Uptime

Two third-party uptime monitoring services (StatusCake and UptimeRobot) tracked the test site for a month. The results for Media Temple showed 99.81% and 100% uptime respectively.

WebPageTest

“WebPagetest is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of our efforts to make the web faster.” WebPageTest grades performance and allows you to run tests from multiple locations simulating real users. MT was tested from Dulles, VA, Miami, FL, Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA.

Company Dulles,VA Miami, FL Denver, CO Los Angeles, CA Average
Media Temple 1.516 0.983 0.955 0.555 1.00225

There was absolutely no issues with their WebPageTest results, it loaded very quickly with a great average speed of one second.

Conclusion

MediaTemple [Reviews] is interesting because I was told it was running the same technology as GoDaddy (GoDaddy bought Media Temple a year ago). They have a few more premium features like Git and a staging environment. Media Temple’s performance was superb. It actually beat GoDaddy’s performance in just about every measure by a marginal amount on both Load Storm and Blitz’s load testing. If GoDaddy's WordPress Hosting has top tier performance, Media Temple certainly does as well.

 

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Pantheon WordPress Hosting Review

This post is based off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2014).

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Overview

Pantheon is one of the new comers into the managed WordPress space. They came over from the Drupal world where they focused on developers and enterprise. They've taken their developer tools and brought them to the WordPress space and made quite a splash leaping into our top tier of managed WordPress hosting companies.

The Plan

All testing was done on the Professional plan (shared) and using the WordPress stack. The plan had 20GB of space and allowed 100,000 visitors per month. The price was $100/month.

Performance

LoadStorm

The first performance test was done with LoadStorm. Pantheon made it to the final round of testing where 2000 concurrent users were logging into WordPress and browsing the test site. The test was designed to test non-cached performance by logging users into WordPress. It caused many hosting setups to crumble. You can see Pantheon's result in this graph (click on it to play with the interactive results):

 

Load-Storm-Pantheon-2000

Pantheon had a whopping zero errors and scaled without issue.  LoadStorm independently analyzed my testing and named Pantheon as performing the best of any WordPress company tested.

Blitz

The second load test that was run on Pantheon was Blitz. Blitz was used to test cached performance. It simply requested the home page from 1-2000 times per second.

Blitz-Pantheon-2000

Pantheon's result looks like it was from a textbook. It maintained roughly the same response time from one to two thousand concurrent users. Full Blitz Results (PDF)

Uptime

Two third-party uptime monitoring services (StatusCake and UptimeRobot) tracked the test site for a month. The results for Pantheon in both cases was perfect uptime. There's nothing more to say than that.

WebPageTest

“WebPagetest is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of our efforts to make the web faster.” WebPageTest grades performance and allows you to run tests from multiple locations simulating real users. Pantheon was tested from Dulles, VA, Miami, FL, Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA.

Company Dulles,VA Miami, FL Denver, CO Los Angeles, CA Average
Pantheon 0.654 0.828 0.923 0.954 0.83975

There was absolutely no issues with their WebPageTest results, it loaded very quickly with a great average speed of under one second.

Conclusion

Pantheon specialized in Drupal hosting, so I was wondering how well it would translate to WordPress. The short answer is, it converted over really well. They had a flawless run on the LoadStorm test - zero errors and not even any spikes in response time over 30 minutes. Pantheon is one of the more expensive options on the market, but they make a very strong case for it. Perfect uptime and near flawless load testing sent them easily into the top tier.

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A Small Orange WordPress Hosting Review

This post is based off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2014).

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Overview

A Small Orange [Reviews] has won numerous awards from Review Signal including Best Overall Web Host 2012, Best Shared Hosting Provider 2013 and Best Managed VPS Provider 2013. They've been consistently near the top of our rankings since the beginning. They stumbled a bit during our first round of WordPress testing.

But what differentiates a good hosting company from an average one? Accepting there was a short-coming and improving. A Small Orange did exactly that in our second round of testing.

The Plan

All testing was done on a Cloud VPS running ASO's WordPress LEMP stack. The VPS had 1 GB Ram, 15 GB SSD disk space, 600 GB of bandwidth and cost $25/month.

Performance

LoadStorm

The first performance test was done with LoadStorm. A Small Orange made it to the final round of testing where 2000 concurrent users were logging into WordPress and browsing the test site. The test was designed to test non-cached performance by logging users into WordPress. It caused many hosting setups to crumble. You can see ASO's result in this graph (click on it to play with the interactive results):

 

Load-Storm-A-Small-Orange-2000

A Small Orange handled the test without a single error and showed no signs of struggling with the load. There isn't much more so say than ASO handled LoadStorm with grace and ease.

Blitz

The second load test that was run on A Small Orange was Blitz. Blitz was used to test cached performance. It simply requested the home page from 1-2000 times per second.

Blitz-A-Small-Orange-2000

A Small Orange's Blitz results were pretty expected based on the previous test. It showed minimal signs of load around ~1800 users where the response times spiked a bit but were still under 150ms which is barely noticeable. Overall, it was a fantastic performance. Full Blitz Results (PDF)

Uptime

Two third-party uptime monitoring services (StatusCake and UptimeRobot) tracked the test site for a month. The results for A Small Orange in both cases was perfect uptime. StatusCake also had a blazingly fast average response time of 23ms, which led the pack by a wide margin. In the uptime department, ASO had a flawless performance.

WebPageTest

“WebPagetest is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of our efforts to make the web faster.” WebPageTest grades performance and allows you to run tests from multiple locations simulating real users. ASO was tested from Dulles, VA, Miami, FL, Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA.

Company Dulles,VA Miami, FL Denver, CO Los Angeles, CA Average
A Small Orange 1.443 0.801 0.836 0.64 0.93

There was absolutely no issues with their WebPageTest results, it loaded very quickly with a great average speed of under one second.

Conclusion

A Small Orange [Reviews] is one of the top tier WordPress hosting providers when looking at performance. ASO improved their LEMP stack since the last time I tested. They never buckled in any test. Their staff was incredibly friendly (special thank you to Ryan MacDonald) and they’ve stepped up their performance game. The one thing that isn’t quite there yet is the documentation/user experience, there are a lot of improvements they could make to make their LEMP stack more accessible to the less tech savvy. All in all, the experience was in-line with what I would expect from a company that has one of the highest support ratings on our site.

Visit A Small Orange and use the coupon code 'orangelover' for 15% off.

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GoDaddy WordPress Hosting Review

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This post is based off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks, where you can read the full details of how GoDaddy performed against the competition.

Overview

GoDaddy [Reviews] is the company that sparked this series of WordPress performance testing. They said their WordPress hosting was as good as anyone else on the markets WordPress hosting. I wanted to see if it was true in our first round of WordPress testing and it certainly was. The second round of testing did not disappoint either. GoDaddy maintained their position in the top tier of managed WordPress providers. This article summarizes GoDaddy's performance under multiple testing scenarios.

The Plan

All testing was done on GoDaddy's shared WordPress Hosting service which cost $6.99/month.The plan allows for 1 site, 100GB of space and 25,000 visitors per month. It also had the usual features of automated backups, 24/7 support via phone or ticket and free migrations.

Performance

LoadStorm

The first performance test was done with LoadStorm. GoDaddy made it to the final round of testing where 2000 concurrent users were logging into WordPress and browsing the test site. The test was designed to test non-cached performance by logging users into WordPress. It caused many hosting setups to crumble. You can see GoDaddy's result in this graph (click on it to play with the interactive results):

Load-Storm-GoDaddy-2000

 

GoDaddy actually pushed through triple the amount of data compared to every other web hosting company. Amazingly, it didn't struggle with this at all. The error rate was an infinitesimal, only 92 errors in over 285,000 requests. Other than a little spike, it handled the entire test without missing a beat.

Blitz

The second load test that was run on GoDaddy was Blitz.io. Blitz was used to test cached performance. It simply requested the home page of our test site from 1-2000 times per second.

Blitz-GoDaddy-2000

 

GoDaddy's Blitz results look exactly like what you hope for. A small spike at the very beginning and then perfectly stable performance afterwards. There are no complaints against its cached performance. Full Blitz Results (PDF)

Uptime

Two third-party uptime monitoring services (UptimeRobot and StatusCake) tracked the test site for a month. The results for GoDaddy was 99.9% and 100% uptime respectively. That is the uptime level you would expect of any good service.

WebPageTest

“WebPagetest is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of our efforts to make the web faster.” WebPageTest grades performance and allows you to run tests from multiple locations simulating real users. GoDaddy was tested from Dulles, VA, Miami, FL, Denver, CO, and Los Angeles, CA.

Company Dulles,VA Miami, FL Denver, CO Los Angeles, CA Average
GoDaddy 1.607 1.355 0.934 0.855 1.18775

There was absolutely no issues with their WebPageTest results, it loaded very quickly at an average speed of under 1.2 seconds to completely load.

Conclusion

GoDaddy [Reviews] is one of the top tier WordPress hosting providers when looking at performance. GoDaddy continues to surprise me. They flew through all the tests, including a weird issue where they transferred 3X the data during the LoadStorm test and didn’t show any signs of stress. The only comparison I have to last time is the Blitz testing, where they eked out another 3000+ hits and raised their hits/second from 829 to 888. GoDaddy also raised their max hit rate marginally from 1750 to 1763. What’s more impressive is they reduced their errors+timeouts from 686 to 93. More hits with less errors. From a performance perspective, they did excellent in absolute terms and relative to their last benchmarks.

Get 25% off with Coupon Code: cjcwp1

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