Lightning Base
Company Profile & Results
Lightning Base was founded in 2011 to provide great managed WordPress hosting at a great price. 10 years later, we host thousands of sites, benefit from continued optimizations to our platform, have locations in the US, Europe, Australia, and Singapore, and provide 24/7 support. Yet contact us, and there is a good chance you'll hear back from the founder/president, as we are large enough to have scale yet small enough to provide personalized service. Sites on our system are fast, reliable, and secure, and we offer easy scaling from a brand new website to complex installs delivering millions of pageviews. Lightning Base is also happy to partner with developers and agencies, offering flexible options for hosting anything from a few WordPress instances to hundreds of client sites.
Disclaimer: Descriptions are provided by the company.
Historical Performance Summary
| Year | <$25 | $25-50 | $51-100 | $101-200 | $201-500 | Enterprise ($500+) | Woo Commerce |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | |||||||
| 2022 | |||||||
| 2021 | |||||||
| 2020 |
2023 WordPress Results
<$25/Month Summary
LoadStorm
Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.
K6
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
WebPageTest
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Uptime
Uptime is monitored by two companies: HetrixTools and Uptime Robot. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.
WPPerformanceTester
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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
SSL
The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/
| Company | Qualsys SSL Grade |
|---|---|
| Lightning Base 2023 25 | A |
2022 WordPress Results
<$25/Month Summary
LoadStorm
Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.
K6
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
WebPageTest
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Uptime
Uptime is monitored by two companies: HetrixTools and Uptime Robot. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.
WPPerformanceTester
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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
SSL
The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/
| Company | Qualsys SSL Grade |
|---|---|
| Lightning Base 2022 25 | A |
2021 WordPress Results
$51-100/Month Summary
<$25/Month Summary
LoadStorm
Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.
K6
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
WebPageTest
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Uptime
Uptime is monitored by two companies: HetrixTools and Uptime Robot. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.
WPPerformanceTester
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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
SSL
The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/
| Company | Qualsys SSL Grade |
|---|---|
| Lightning Base 2021 100 | A |
| Lightning Base 2021 25 | A |
Internet.nl
The tool is available at https://internet.nl/test-site/.
Mozilla Observatory
The tool is available at https://observatory.mozilla.org/.
| Company | Mozilla Observatory |
|---|---|
| Lightning Base 2021 100 | F |
| Lightning Base 2021 25 | F |
2021 WooCommerce Results
WooCommerce Summary
LoadStorm
Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.
Load Storm Average Response Time by Profile
This takes deeper look at the results and analyzes the performance of loading HTML mime types, to ignore a lot of static assets which are cached and bring down average response times. This tests how fast the initial pages are delivered, which is what a user would experience before loading all the other assets like css, javascript and images.
K6
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
WebPageTest
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Uptime
Uptime is monitored by two companies: HetrixTools and Uptime Robot. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.
WPPerformanceTester
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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
SSL
The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/
| Company | Qualsys SSL Grade |
|---|---|
| Lightning Base 2021 WooCommerce | A |
Internet.nl
The tool is available at https://internet.nl/test-site/.
Mozilla Observatory
The tool is available at https://observatory.mozilla.org/.
| Company | Mozilla Observatory |
|---|---|
| Lightning Base 2021 WooCommerce | F |
2020 WordPress Results
$51-100/Month Summary
<$25/Month Summary
LoadStorm
Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.
K6
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
WebPageTest
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Uptime
Uptime is monitored by two companies: HetrixTools and Uptime Robot. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.
WPPerformanceTester
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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
SSL
The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/
| Company | Qualsys SSL Grade |
|---|---|
| Lightning Base 2020 100 | A |
| Lightning Base 2020 25 | A |
