Tag Archives: reviews

Pantheon WordPress Hosting Review

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

pantheon_logo_tagline

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.

asmallorange

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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Digital Ocean Logo

Introducing Digital Ocean – Low Cost SSD VPS Provider

We are happy to announce Digital Ocean has been added to Review Signal today.

Read our 1,200+ Digital Ocean Reviews or use Promo Code SSDTWTTR to get $10 Free Credit.

Digital Ocean is a relatively new provider in the cloud vps hosting space and has skyrocketed in popularity (over 5,000% in the past six months!). It seems that their explosive growth is backed up by the data we've collected. Digital Ocean has an overall rating of 81% at the this time. That's the highest rated web hosting company on Review Signal at the time of writing.

As of yesterday, Digital Ocean has opened up a second data center in New York (NY2) and now offers San Franciso, New York and Amsterdam as locations. Their plans start at $5/month for a 512MB (RAM) and 20GB SSD of space.

Congratulations and welcome to Digital Ocean!

WPEngine Logo

Introducing WPEngine – Managed WordPress Hosting

We are happy to announce WPEngine as the newest addition to ReviewSignal! In two months, we have collected over 100 reviews about WPEngine and their customers are raving about them. They have earned themselves the highest rating of any company monitored with a whopping overall rating of 82%!

We talked briefly to Co-Founder Ben Metcalfe about what makes WPEngine special:

"WP Engine is the Premium Managed WordPress Hosting Platform focused on providing Speed, Security and Scale. All accounts are automatically installed, setup, optimized, backed up and most crucially kept up to date with the lastest version of WordPress. WP Engine only supports WordPress and everyone on staff is a WordPress expert." - Ben Metcalfe

We would like to give a big congratulations to WPEngine and encourage our readers to read WPEngine Reviews on Review Signal!

Imagining a Better Review Site

I was a pretty unsatisfied consumer. There are so many review sites and so few that I actually trust. Other than my few trusted review sites which covered very specific topics, I was lost and confused about who to trust for information. Asking friends only went so far and people often give conflicting opinions. I searched what a lot of people were saying but there was no easy way to find any sort of consensus. There were always questions, and I often felt like I didn't have enough information to make a good decision.

It was a year and a half ago, I had just finished my Master's thesis about using Twitter data to predict box office sales for movies based on word of mouth. Then, it occurred to me, we don't write reviews, we talk with friends. Reviews are embedded into our every day conversations, and every single person on earth does it. We talk about what we like and dislike but it doesn't happen to be written in 'review' format. What if I could collect that data and make sense of it all?

I am proud to introduce Review Signal: a new kind of review site based on what people really think.

Our goals are simple:

  • Be transparent about where each opinion comes from and source it to the original location
  • Define very clearly how things are rated in an easy to understand way

Review Signal has been launched covering our first market: web hosting reviews. We've gathered a list of some of the most popular web hosting companies and collected over 100,000 opinions expressed about them. We've analyzed them and even broken down some important and hard-to-measure values such as how satisfied people are with the support offered by a company.

Visit Web Hosting Reviews at Review Signal

Web hosting is just the start. We would love to review everything, but we're also realistic about what we can do and how fast we can do it.  We will expand to other niches as fast as we can while still maintaining our strict quality standards.  If there is some market you're unhappy with and think we can make a difference, we would love to hear from you!  We also look forward to any and all feedback, suggestions, ideas and criticisms.  Contact us.

Kevin Ohashi

Founder