Please read the Methodology to fully understand the scope of these tests.
Note: Please check company profiles for summary of performances across multiple tiers. Some companies also offer promotions or coupon codes for a discount as well.
Flywheel, GridPane, Jelastic, Pantheon, Pressable, Presslabs, Seravo, Servebolt and WPVIP all handled this test without issue. It's impressive how the average response time for every company was below 200ms.
K6 Testing Results
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
No company struggled with the Load Impact test. Jelastic had a very strange looking graph with response times bouncing up and down, possibly an auto scaling issue? GridPane's graph looked like there was an increasing in load but the peak was under 300ms, it really isn't an issue.
Uptime Testing Results
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.
Results Table
Company
Uptime Robot
Hetrix
Alt Uptime Monitor
Flywheel
100
100
GridPane.com
100
100
Pantheon
100
100
Pressable
100
100
Presslabs
100
100
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
99.979
99.99
Seravo
99.984
100
Servebolt
99.581
100
99.99
WordPress VIP
100
100
Discussion
No companies had any uptime issues.
Servebolt also had a discrepancy between UptimeRobot and StatusCake uptime. One showed a very low 99.581 and the other 100. The third monitor I setup showed 99.99%, so I went with the StatusCake number.
WebPageTest Testing Results
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Results Table
Company
Virginia
California
London
Frankfurt
Singapore
Mumbai
Tokyo
Sydney
Brazil
Average
Rose Hill Mauritius
Israel
Flywheel
0.351
0.433
0.352
0.353
0.371
0.417
0.41
0.439
0.381
0.4995833333
1.058
0.91
GridPane.com
0.45
0.783
1.054
1.032
2.091
2.443
1.581
2.161
1.179
1.451916667
2.321
1.547
Pantheon
0.472
0.569
0.61
0.632
0.885
0.988
1.006
0.954
0.688
0.9871666667
3.26
1.13
Pressable
0.473
0.957
1.238
1.172
2.309
2.039
1.85
2.335
1.322
1.654666667
3.217
2.027
Presslabs
0.66
0.854
0.369
0.389
0.367
0.565
0.604
0.468
1.556
0.7021666667
1.102
0.881
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
0.634
0.92
0.325
0.419
1.316
0.847
1.632
1.506
1.131
1.114166667
2.522
1.048
Seravo
0.342
0.401
0.46
0.345
0.527
0.57
0.368
0.438
0.35
0.5310833333
1.02
0.973
Servebolt
0.426
0.645
0.639
0.671
1.053
0.99
0.847
1.065
0.784
0.8994166667
1.769
1.213
WordPress VIP
0.421
0.531
0.704
0.722
1.618
1.451
1.037
1.271
0.698
0.989
1.593
1.16
Discussion
Flywheel and Seravo were neck and neck with Flywheel edging out Seravo by 31ms for fastest average load time. Pressable was the slowest in 7/12 locations.
WPPerformanceTester Testing 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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
Results Table
Company
PHP Bench
WP Bench
Flywheel
8.852
357.1428571
GridPane.com
6.093
923
Pantheon
11.098
226.3980077
Pressable
6.284
1344.086022
Presslabs
6.712
1242.236025
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
7.524
314.861461
Seravo
6.12
820.3445447
Servebolt
3.292
2037
WordPress VIP
9.875
854.7008547
Discussion
Servebolt stood out being the fastest PHP Bench and WP Bench. GridPane, Pressable, Presslabs and Seravo all had faster PHP bench scores than the second fastest company last year (Presslabs); so it's nice to see the whole field getting faster.
*GridPane.com couldn't run the WPPerformanceTester plugin because of the database layer they run wasn't compatible (LudicrousDB). The same commands were executed manually that the WPPerformanceTester does against the system to replicate the numbers.
GridPane, Pantheon, Presslabs and Seravo all earned A+ ratings. 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
There are two levels of recognition awarded to companies that participate in the tests. There is no ‘best’ declared, it’s simply tiered, it’s hard to come up with an objective ranking system because of the complex nature of hosting. These tests also don’t take into account outside factors such as reviews, support, and features. It is simply testing performance as described in the methodology.
Top Tier
This year's Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance Award goes to the following companies who showed virtually no signs of struggle during the testing.
The following companies earned Honorable Mention status because they did very well and had a minor issue or two holding them back from earning Top Tier status.
Perfect uptime. The fastest WebPageTest average response time. Second and third fastest Load Impact and Load Storm average response speed respectively. A well deserved Top Tier performance.
One of the new entrants in this years test, GridPane only competed at the Enterprise tier to likely send a message that says we're here and we're serious. Well the results say, welcome to the club. Perfect uptime and the second fastest Load Storm average response time combined with a miniscule 3 total errors on both load tests say GridPane is here to perform. The only improvement I would like to see is better scores on WebPageTest where outside of US/Europe it wasn't as fast as some of the competition. Overall, happy to see GridPane show us that another Top Tier Enterprise performer is here.
Pantheon had perfect uptime and the third fastest Load Impact peak average response time. There isn't much to say other than they earned a Top Tier performance and had a nice improvement in the Load Storm test compared to last year with fewer errors and half the average response time.
Pressable had perfect uptime and only 5 total errors on both load tests. I'd like to see faster response times globally but it was a Top Tier performance for sure.
This small company has participated many years and continues to impress with yet another Top Tier performance. Perfect uptime. 1 error total on the load tests was the lowest total of any company. The third fastest average response time on WebPageTest. Well done Presslabs.
Jelastic competed in many tiers and I was excited to see them figure out a way to balance their slightly different billing scheme to fit into these tests. Their platform scaled all the way up to the Enterprise tier, showing that it can handle tremendous loads without struggling. It earned Top Tier recognition in yet another tier, well done.
The third new Enterprise Tier entrant didn't disappoint. Seravo was neck and neck with Flywheel for the fastest average response time globally on WebPageTest. They had a total of 6 errors on excellent load tests. Welcome to the Top Tier Seravo.
Servebolt continued it's dominance in the WPPerformanceTester results into the Enterprise Tier being the fastest by a solid margin again on both PHP and WP Bench. They also managed the fastest average response time on Load Storm and kept a global average response time under 1000ms on WebPageTest which put them in 4th place. Another Top Tier performance by Servebolt.
Perfect uptime. 3 total errors across both load tests. The fastest peak average response time on Load Impact. WordPress VIP continues to deliver Top Tier performances.
About the Author
Kevin Ohashi
Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.
Please read the Methodology to fully understand the scope of these tests.
Note: Please check company profiles for summary of performances across multiple tiers. Some companies also offer promotions or coupon codes for a discount as well.
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 Testing Results
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.
Results Table
Company
Uptime Robot
Hetrix
Alt Uptime Monitor
Cloudways
100
100
Nestify
100
100
Pressable
100
100
RAIDBOXES
99.999
100
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
98.587
99.99
98.56
Servebolt
99.583
99.99
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 Testing Results
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Results Table
Company
Virginia
California
London
Frankfurt
Singapore
Mumbai
Tokyo
Sydney
Brazil
Average
Rose Hill Mauritius
Israel
Cloudways
0.337
0.639
0.658
0.732
1.722
1.55
1.273
1.525
1.019
1.11025
2.02
1.187
Nestify
0.486
1.13
1.697
1.623
3.246
3.538
2.357
2.903
1.815
2.174083333
4.26
2.077
Pressable
0.521
1.01
1.311
1.259
2.243
1.971
1.757
2.191
1.513
1.6685
3.31
1.92
RAIDBOXES
0.875
1.456
0.428
0.369
1.373
1.069
2.387
2.408
1.775
1.350333333
1.984
0.893
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
1.122
2.182
0.304
0.417
3.616
1.791
3.39
4.121
3.008
2.162083333
3.106
1.019
Servebolt
0.475
0.617
0.582
0.713
1.052
0.987
0.881
1.087
0.795
0.8981666667
1.68
1.218
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 Testing 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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
Results Table
Company
PHP Bench
WP Bench
Cloudways
7.538
689.1798759
Nestify
7.486
742.9420505
Pressable
6.215
1367.989056
RAIDBOXES
5.644
938.0863039
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
7.649
1213.592233
Servebolt
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.
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
There are two levels of recognition awarded to companies that participate in the tests. There is no ‘best’ declared, it’s simply tiered, it’s hard to come up with an objective ranking system because of the complex nature of hosting. These tests also don’t take into account outside factors such as reviews, support, and features. It is simply testing performance as described in the methodology.
Top Tier
This year's Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance Award goes to the following companies who showed virtually no signs of struggle during the testing.
The following companies earned Honorable Mention status because they did very well and had a minor issue or two holding them back from earning Top Tier status.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
About the Author
Kevin Ohashi
Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.
Please read the Methodology to fully understand the scope of these tests.
Note: Please check company profiles for summary of performances across multiple tiers. Some companies also offer promotions or coupon codes for a discount as well.
Jelastic, Pantheon, Pressable, Seravo, Servebolt and WPOven didn't experience any issues with the Load Impact test.
1&1 IONOS ran into security measures again and experienced a lot of errors.
Cloudways experienced some stress and response times increased substantially starting around 1200 users.
Nestify started experiencing load around 2500 and increased slightly to 1s average response time.
Uptime Testing Results
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.
Results Table
Company
Uptime Robot
Hetrix
Alt Uptime Monitor
Cloudways
100
100
IONOS
99.986
99.99
Nestify
100
100
Pantheon
100
100
Pressable
100
100
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
99.99
99.99
Seravo
100
100
Servebolt
99.582
99.99
99.99
WPOven
100
100
Discussion
Every company did well maintaining above 99.98% uptime. The only issue was a strange discrepancy between UptimeRobot and StatusCake on Servebolt's uptime. One showed a very low 99.582 and the other 99.99. The third monitor I setup showed 99.99%, so the issue appears to be with Uptime Robot.
WebPageTest Testing Results
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Results Table
Company
Virginia
California
London
Frankfurt
Singapore
Mumbai
Tokyo
Sydney
Brazil
Average
Rose Hill Mauritius
Israel
Cloudways
1
0.623
0.698
0.743
1.638
1.538
1.139
1.577
0.992
1.1465
2.029
1.197
IONOS
0.675
0.697
1.006
1.141
1.834
2.047
1.239
1.882
1.454
1.42275
2.939
1.57
Nestify
0.475
1.148
1.432
1.518
3.229
3.533
2.598
2.92
1.823
2.118166667
3.775
2.047
Pantheon
0.436
0.588
0.534
0.59
0.875
0.874
1.092
0.896
0.673
0.9809166667
3.265
1.145
Pressable
0.391
1.008
1.224
1.188
2.322
2.226
1.78
2.245
1.324
1.646166667
3.367
1.868
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
0.822
1.563
0.384
0.361
2.815
1.518
2.76
2.965
2.317
1.658916667
2.12
0.976
Seravo
0.428
0.656
0.822
1.04
2.213
1.962
1.465
2.073
1.35
1.37025
2.474
1.379
Servebolt
0.454
0.59
0.561
0.652
1.047
1.182
1.045
1.092
0.749
0.9150833333
1.797
1.173
WPOven
0.43
0.76
0.903
0.907
1.796
1.671
1.459
1.659
1.02
1.22975
2.275
1.205
Discussion
Pantheon picked up the fastest response times in 5/12 locations. Servebolt ended up being the fastest in only two locations but had the fastest average overall being near the fastest in most locaations. Nestify didn't stand out well here being slowest in 6/12 locales and second slowest in 5/12. Jelastic was the slowest in 5 locations, second slowest in 2 locations and the fastest in 3 locations.
WPPerformanceTester Testing 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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
Results Table
Company
PHP Bench
WP Bench
Cloudways
7.605
628.1407035
IONOS
10.029
370.5075954
Nestify
7.487
753.0120482
Pantheon
8.996
309.8853424
Pressable
6.213
1297.016861
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
7.888
1314.060447
Seravo
8.029
463.6068614
Servebolt
3.275
2049.180328
WPOven
11.831
497.2650423
Discussion
Servebolt blew away the competition on this test recording near 50% faster scores on both PHP bench and WP bench than the next fastest competitors. The competition wasn't slow either, Pressable's PHP bench was a near 50% improvement over their own score last year too.
No company achieved 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
There are two levels of recognition awarded to companies that participate in the tests. There is no ‘best’ declared, it’s simply tiered, it’s hard to come up with an objective ranking system because of the complex nature of hosting. These tests also don’t take into account outside factors such as reviews, support, and features. It is simply testing performance as described in the methodology.
Top Tier
This year's Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance Award goes to the following companies who showed virtually no signs of struggle during the testing.
The following companies earned Honorable Mention status because they did very well and had a minor issue or two holding them back from earning Top Tier status.
1&1 IONOS was marred by security measures that couldn't be worked around. Their uptime was solid, but the load tests just had too many errors which seemed like were triggered by security features because response times were remaining flat.
Nestify's perfect uptime was a great start. 1 error total between both load tests. The only issue was the response times increased around 2500 users on Load Impact to over 1000ms which meant Nestify earned Honorable Mention status.
100% uptime. Effortless load test results including the fastest Load Impact average response time. Often the fastest response times on WebPageTest with the second fastest average load time overall. A solid showing earned Pantheon Top Tier status.
Perfect uptime. Incredibly fast Load Impact results with zero errors and second fastest peak average load time. The only thing that kept Pressable from earning Top Tier status was Load Storm slowing down responses from 500ms to 1100ms during the test. Honorable Mention well earned.
Servebolt prides themselves on speed. They were blazingly fast on WPPerformanceTester. They had the fastest average response time on WebPageTest. They had the fastest Load Storm average response time. Top Tier honors were easily awarded to Servebolt.
A relatively unknown provider which intermittently participates in these benchmarks. Each time they seem to do quite well earning Top Tier honors for the third time in a row this year. Perfect uptime and excellent load tests will do that. Well done and welcome back WPOven.
About the Author
Kevin Ohashi
Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.
Please read the Methodology to fully understand the scope of these tests.
Note: Please check company profiles for summary of performances across multiple tiers. Some companies also offer promotions or coupon codes for a discount as well.
1&1 IONOS, Cloudways, HighAvailability, Jelastic, LightningBase, Nestify, Pressable, Servebolt and WPX Hosting didn't have any issues.
A2 Hosting started slowing down around 1600 users and average response times went up substantially. DreamHost started slowing down around 1300 users but didn't have a single error.
K6 Testing Results
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
Cloudways, High Availability, Jelastic, LightningBase, Nestify, Pressable, Servebolt and WPX Hosting didn't have any issues.
1&1 IONOS slowed down around 1050 users. A2 Hosting collapsed with an average response time spiking to over 48 seconds. DreamHost started slowing down around 1400 users but didn't error out.
Uptime Testing Results
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.
Results Table
Company
Uptime Robot
Hetrix
Alt Uptime Monitor
A2Hosting
99.993
99.99
Cloudways
99.982
99.92
DreamHost
100
100
highavailability.io
99.997
100
IONOS
100
100
Lightning Base
100
100
Nestify
100
100
Pressable
100
100
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
99.99
99.99
Servebolt
99.583
99.99
99.99
WPX
100
99.99
Discussion
Every company did well maintaining above 99.9% uptime. The only issue was a strange discrepancy between UptimeRobot and StatusCake on Servebolt's uptime. One showed a very low 99.583 and the other 99.99. The third monitor I setup showed 99.99%, so the issue appears to be with Uptime Robot.
WebPageTest Testing Results
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Results Table
Company
Virginia
California
London
Frankfurt
Singapore
Mumbai
Tokyo
Sydney
Brazil
Average
Rose Hill Mauritius
Israel
A2Hosting
0.829
0.6
1.453
1.578
2.114
2.653
1.458
2.13
1.839
1.770833333
3.448
2.496
Cloudways
0.389
0.689
0.73
0.805
1.783
1.838
1.249
1.747
0.98
1.174083333
2.086
1.211
DreamHost
0.405
0.252
0.65
0.745
0.83
1.25
0.531
0.961
0.888
0.83125
1.734
1.174
highavailability.io
0.346
0.555
0.761
0.983
1.482
1.987
1.091
1.382
1.054
1.1535
2.272
1.337
IONOS
0.654
0.801
1.274
1.364
2.314
2.851
1.777
2.293
2.705
1.88775
3.877
1.875
Lightning Base
0.45
0.58
0.922
0.967
1.74
2.075
1.142
1.776
1.254
1.261416667
2.136
1.482
Nestify
0.446
1.151
1.522
1.628
3.259
3.496
2.454
2.971
1.828
2.152583333
4.156
2.015
Pressable
0.465
1.069
1.212
1.337
2.258
2.17
1.746
2.111
1.4
1.663166667
3.258
1.964
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
0.897
1.51
0.292
0.372
2.578
1.312
2.556
2.947
2.177
1.594416667
2.128
0.996
Servebolt
0.394
0.623
0.643
0.649
1.094
1.174
1.051
1.089
0.791
0.9419166667
1.758
1.209
WPX
0.421
0.667
0.918
1.183
1.682
2.61
1.337
2.192
1.92
1.469916667
2.781
1.391
Discussion
DreamHost did shockingly well being the fastest in 5/12 locations and the second fastest in 3/12. Servebolt was the fastest in 2 locations and second in 6 more. Jelastic had a confusing performance of being the fastest in 1 location and slowest in 3 and second slowest in an additional 3 more. Nestify didn't stand out in a good way being the slowest in 6/12 locales.
WPPerformanceTester Testing 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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
Results Table
Company
PHP Bench
WP Bench
A2Hosting
11.458
953.2888465
Cloudways
7.948
722.5433526
DreamHost
7.654
1013.171226
highavailability.io
10.23
29.64719834
IONOS
10.755
523.5602094
Lightning Base
6.383
871.0801394
Nestify
7.481
808.4074373
Pressable
7.904
877.9631255
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
7.715
1503.759398
Servebolt
3.298
2155.172414
WPX
8.407
713.7758744
Discussion
Servebolt stole the show here with completing the PHP bench in nearly half the time of the next fastest competitor. Servebolt also had the fastest WP bench by over 40% and almost two orders of magnitude faster than the slowest WP bench. But both the slowest and fastest WP bench scores were able to handle the load tests without issue showing that different architectures with different trade offs can both perform well.
No company scored an A+. 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
There are two levels of recognition awarded to companies that participate in the tests. There is no ‘best’ declared, it’s simply tiered, it’s hard to come up with an objective ranking system because of the complex nature of hosting. These tests also don’t take into account outside factors such as reviews, support, and features. It is simply testing performance as described in the methodology.
Top Tier
This year's Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance Award goes to the following companies who showed virtually no signs of struggle during the testing.
The following companies earned Honorable Mention status because they did very well and had a minor issue or two holding them back from earning Top Tier status.
The good news was A2 Hosting had over 99.99% uptime on both monitors. The bad news is they failed both load tests with response times rising significantly. Not sure what happened this year but hopefully they make some improvements next year and do much better.
Zero errors on both load tests and no impact on response times, one of only two companies in this price tier that managed to pull off the perfect load tests. Congrats on earning Top Tier status.
DreamHost managed perfect uptime and zero load testing errors. DreamHost also had the fastest average load speed on WebPageTest. The problem was keeping the response times down during load testing, the servers slowed on both tests causing response times to rise substantially. DreamHost manages to do well, but just not well enough, I hope to see them do a little bit better next year and earn some more recognition.
Perfect uptime and an almost perfect Load Storm test were a great start. Unfortunately, the Load Impact test proved to be a bit too much. Hopefully next year improvements in the static caching will let them earn Top Tier status.
Consistency seems to define Lightning Base. Perfect uptime. Only 7 errors total on load testing. For the sixth year in a row across every tier they've participated in, Lightning Base has earned Top Tier status. This year is no exception, consistently excellent performance that doesn't get enough recognition.
Perfect uptime. 1 error during the load tests. The only thing I'd like to see improved is the global response times which are a non impacting measurement. Nestify definitely earned their Top Tier status this year. congratulations.
Shaky uptime was an issue in the past, but perfect uptime this year shows Pressable has really stepped it up. The load tests went well, especially having the fastest Load Impact response times. It's nice seeing positive improvements leading to Pressable earning Top Tier status again.
Servebolt's second year was kind to them. Their new servers blew away the competition on WPPerformanceTester and it wasn't even close. Servebolt also managed the fastest average response time on Load Storm and the second fastest average response time on WebPageTest. Servebolt is really pushing hard on the speed button and it earned them another Top Tier performance.
WPX had near perfect uptime and did excellent on both load tests. It wasn't flashy but they were the third fastest average response on Load Storm and second fastest on Load Impact. A consistently great performance which got them another Top Tier award this year.
About the Author
Kevin Ohashi
Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.
Please read the Methodology to fully understand the scope of these tests.
Note: Please check company profiles for summary of performances across multiple tiers. Some companies also offer promotions or coupon codes for a discount as well.
WordPress.com Business (Automattic), HighAvailability, Nestify, Onyx, Pantheon, Pressable, Seravo, Servebolt, SiteGround and WPX Hosting all handled this test without any issues.
1&1 IONOS and Cloudways slowed down but didn't error out.
K6 Testing Results
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
1&1 IONOS, WordPress.com Business (Automattic), HighAvailability, Nestify, Onyx, Pantheon, Pressable, Seravo, Servebolt, SiteGround and WPX Hosting all handled this test without issue.
Cloudways slowed down and had peak average response time climb to almost 1.5s.
Uptime Testing Results
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.
Results Table
Company
Uptime Robot
Hetrix
Alt Uptime Monitor
Cloudways
100
100
highavailability.io
100
100
IONOS
99.999
99.99
Nestify
100
100
Onyx (Krystal Hosting)
99.998
100
Pantheon
100
100
Pressable
100
100
Seravo
100
100
Servebolt
99.946
99.96
99.94
SiteGround
100
99.99
WordPress.com
100
100
WPX
100
99.99
Discussion
Everyone maintained uptime above 99.9% including with 11/12 keeping 99.99% or higher.
WebPageTest Testing Results
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Results Table
Company
Virginia
California
London
Frankfurt
Singapore
Mumbai
Tokyo
Sydney
Brazil
Average
Rose Hill Mauritius
Israel
Cloudways
0.378
0.751
0.781
0.806
1.821
1.907
1.235
1.73
0.99
1.19075
2.076
1.147
highavailability.io
0.412
0.577
0.971
0.815
1.873
2.402
1.073
1.338
1.18
1.229416667
2.273
1.274
IONOS
0.663
0.925
1.212
1.52
2.905
2.593
2.974
2.684
1.769
2.0165
3.921
1.952
Nestify
0.485
1.145
1.536
1.601
3.138
3.531
2.469
2.913
1.911
2.162916667
4.197
2.036
Onyx (Krystal Hosting)
0.681
1.413
0.371
0.391
2.085
2.136
2.019
2.531
1.596
1.473833333
2.104
1.075
Pantheon
0.511
0.475
0.558
0.853
0.924
0.956
0.876
0.847
0.997
1.02275
3.391
1.115
Pressable
0.543
0.897
0.958
0.882
1.764
2.237
1.445
1.649
1.596
1.422666667
2.558
1.661
Seravo
0.513
0.68
0.942
1.13
2.23
1.964
1.532
1.855
1.426
1.36825
2.136
1.464
Servebolt
0.655
0.907
0.457
0.454
1.08
0.974
1.161
1.366
1.051
0.9669166667
1.584
1.058
SiteGround
0.549
0.796
1.072
1.158
2.425
2.421
1.737
2.39
1.602
1.60075
2.823
1.608
WordPress.com
0.768
0.588
1.109
1.206
1.068
2.122
0.798
1.16
1.22
1.278
2.938
1.581
WPX
0.47
0.657
1.026
1.081
1.748
2.427
1.44
2.245
1.919
1.499333333
2.825
1.445
Discussion
1&1 IONOS and Nestify stand out as the two slowest around the globe being first or second in 8/12 locales together. Onyx, the UK based company, was the fastest in London and Frankfurt, which is nice to see that geography seems to make an impact. Servebolt picked up the fastest average response time at just under a second average across the 12 locales.
WPPerformanceTester Testing 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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
Results Table
Company
PHP Bench
WP Bench
Cloudways
8.486
498.2561036
highavailability.io
10.392
27.53910553
IONOS
10.774
407.3319756
Nestify
7.486
777.6049767
Onyx (Krystal Hosting)
11.083
257.003341
Pantheon
9.793
273.5978112
Pressable
6.217
1375.515818
Seravo
7.926
485.2013586
Servebolt
2.436
2403.846154
SiteGround
7.425
1297.016861
WordPress.com
6.255
2066.115702
WPX
8.389
699.3006993
Discussion
The clear standout here is Servebolt with some of the fastest times I've ever seen. WordPress.com Business isn't too far back with both of them breaking them 2000 mark on WP bench (which is more than double WordPress.com Business' score last year). The highest score in any tier last year was in 1700 range (from Servebolt and High Availability[under old IWW brand]), so this is a drastic improvement.
Pantheon is the only company that achieved 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
There are two levels of recognition awarded to companies that participate in the tests. There is no ‘best’ declared, it’s simply tiered, it’s hard to come up with an objective ranking system because of the complex nature of hosting. These tests also don’t take into account outside factors such as reviews, support, and features. It is simply testing performance as described in the methodology.
Top Tier
This year's Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance Award goes to the following companies who showed virtually no signs of struggle during the testing.
The following companies earned Honorable Mention status because they did very well and had a minor issue or two holding them back from earning Top Tier status.
Cloudways had perfect uptime on both monitors which was good. The problem was the load tests caused the server to slow down and have high response times.
100% uptime is really nice to see. 0 Load Impact errors and a miniscule 18 errors on Load Storm wrap up an overall excellent performance, well deserving of Top Tier honors.
1&1 IONOS overall had a much stronger showing here than in the tier below. The server didn't error out on any tests. It kept excellent uptime. The only issue was Load Storm seemed to slow down the server to over 2s average load times which kept it out of earning any recognition.
This UK brand (owned by Krystal Hosting) earned itself their first Top Tier honors ever. Dedicated to Managed WordPress Hosting, the new offering really showed off well with near perfect uptime of 100 and 99.998%. It was also the fastest in London and Frankfurt on WebPageTest.
Pantheon has historically done very well in these tests and this year was no exception. Perfect uptime. The absolute fastest Load Impact response time at a blazing 23ms. They were also the fastest on WebPageTest from 4/12 locales. A Top Tier performance without question.
Perfect uptime. The second fastest average response time on Load Storm (only beat by WordPress.com Business which are both owned by Automattic). Pressable also had the second fastest PHP bench score. Well deserved on another Top Tier performance this year.
The only truly new entrant in this price tier put on excellent showing with perfect uptime, zero errors on Load Impact and only three errors on Load Storm. Nice to see new entrant do so spectacularly and earn Top Tier status.
The second year for Servebolt has treated them well. They haven't missed a beat with near perfect load tests. They stood out the most on the WPPerformanceTester benchmark where they blew away the numbers from last year. Top Tier performance again.
Near perfect uptime. A total of one error on both load tests. It wasn't flashy in any of the results but it handled all the tests gracefully and earned another Top Tier mark this year.
The other Automattic brand. It appears there may be some similarities in infrastructure with sister brand Pressable. They had similar PHP bench scores which were very fast. They also shared perfect uptime. An excellent brand to be sharing a lot in common with. WordPress.com Business stood out in having the fastest average response on Load Storm and the second fastest on Load Impact. They also had the second fastest WP bench score. Another year, another Top Tier performance well earned.
WPX Hosting had 100/99.99% uptime marks. Their average response times on both load tests was in the snappy 100ms range. WPX earned themselves Top Tier honors again this year.
About the Author
Kevin Ohashi
Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.
Please read the Methodology to fully understand the scope of these tests.
Note: Please check company profiles for summary of performances across multiple tiers. Some companies also offer promotions or coupon codes for a discount as well.
34SP, A2 Hosting, DreamHost, GoDaddy, GreenGeeks, HighAvailability, Krystal Hosting, LightningBase, Raidboxes, SiteGround, TVC.Net, WPCycle and WPX Hosting all handled the Load Storm test without any issues. Wetopi had a few errors but overall quite good at a minimal 0.37% error rate.
1&1 IONOS appeared to have security features that couldn't be worked around, they maintained a constant response time and error rate. ChemiCloud had some wp-login security issues and hit the limitations of the plan. Cloudways slowed down and response times increased. Flywheel was overwhelmed by the test. InMotion Hosting was overwhelmed by the test as well. NameCheap struggled to keep up with the test.
K6 Testing Results
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
A2 Hosting, ChemiCloud, Flywheel, GoDaddy, GreenGeeks, High Availability, InMotion Hosting, LightningBase, Namecheap, Raidboxes, SiteGround, TVCNet, and WPX Hosting all handled the Load Impact test without any issues.
34SP had a couple spikes but overall did pretty well. DreamHost saw some small spikes and increased response times. Krystal generally handled it well except for a couple spikes.
Cloudways, Wetopi and WPCycle didn't error out but saw a substantial increase in response times.
1&1 IONOS had over 5000 errors on each test and slow response times which the company said was due to its webshield security features which couldn't be turned off.
Uptime Testing Results
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.
Results Table
Company
Uptime Robot
Hetrix
Alt Uptime Monitor
34SP.com
99.963
99.94
A2Hosting
100
99.99
ChemiCloud
100
100
Cloudways
100
100
DreamHost
99.97
99.95
EasyWP by Namecheap
99.748
99.75
Flywheel
100
100
GoDaddy
99.993
99.96
GreenGeeks
99.894
99.96
99.9
highavailability.io
99.999
100
InMotion Hosting
99.938
99.94
IONOS Shared
99.994
100
IONOS WP
99.94
99.97
Krystal Hosting
99.999
100
Lightning Base
100
100
RAIDBOXES
99.999
100
SiteGround
100
99.99
TVC.Net
99.84
99.87
Wetopi
99.992
99.98
WPCycle
99.414
99.5
WPX
99.999
99.99
Discussion
Most companies did fine maintaining above 99.9% uptime.
GreenGeeks had conflicting monitors of 99.96% and 99.894%, so a tiebreak monitor was checked which showed 99.9% making it the most borderline result I've ever encountered.
Namecheap, TVCNet and WPCycle experienced downtime which kept them below 99.9% threshold.
*SiteGround had one downtime event which was caused by me not verifying the test domain which I discounted from the uptime monitoring.
WebPageTest Testing Results
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Results Table
Company
Virginia
California
London
Frankfurt
Singapore
Mumbai
Tokyo
Sydney
Brazil
Average
Rose Hill Mauritius
Israel
34SP.com
0.823
1.334
0.521
0.393
2.013
1.269
2.35
2.935
1.731
1.453166667
1.885
0.889
A2Hosting
0.566
0.743
0.983
1.081
1.93
1.837
1.554
2.09
1.424
1.391916667
2.406
1.456
ChemiCloud
0.344
0.772
0.771
0.867
2.006
1.781
1.334
1.907
1.091
1.24175
2.176
1.273
Cloudways
0.426
0.685
0.681
0.798
1.772
1.903
1.296
1.781
0.987
1.193833333
2.177
1.235
DreamHost
0.531
0.284
0.88
0.744
0.805
1.361
0.55
0.964
0.877
0.8611666667
1.726
1.15
EasyWP by Namecheap
0.685
0.521
1.382
1.474
1.813
2.213
1.252
1.683
1.717
1.48675
2.623
1.815
Flywheel
0.362
0.374
0.412
0.346
0.352
0.414
0.373
0.463
0.368
0.48575
1.006
0.824
GoDaddy
0.604
0.896
0.909
0.989
1.505
2.38
1.292
1.972
1.704
1.446416667
2.338
1.58
GreenGeeks
0.533
0.616
0.744
0.818
1.699
1.545
1.264
1.917
1.218
1.18525
2.042
1.244
highavailability.io
0.458
0.513
0.868
0.958
1.554
2.222
1.249
1.334
1.102
1.198166667
2.263
1.246
InMotion Hosting
0.372
0.687
0.751
0.79
1.811
1.482
1.468
1.679
1.051
1.1845
2.252
1.185
IONOS Shared
0.63
0.739
1.136
1.219
2.02
2.258
1.453
2.062
1.479
1.527833333
2.987
1.572
IONOS WP
0.714
0.749
1.045
1.29
1.867
2.243
1.513
1.916
1.622
1.52675
2.964
1.598
Krystal Hosting
0.85
1.494
0.479
0.463
2.252
1.209
2.235
2.688
1.764
1.506583333
2.512
0.921
Lightning Base
0.478
0.577
0.901
1.081
1.614
2.167
1.139
1.831
1.374
1.278416667
2.109
1.423
RAIDBOXES
0.805
1.399
0.417
0.431
1.346
1.059
2.226
2.418
1.762
1.3325
1.941
1.089
SiteGround
0.526
0.711
0.88
1.082
2.059
1.902
1.711
2.138
1.543
1.4425
2.621
1.518
TVC.Net
0.737
0.603
1.248
1.359
1.755
2.172
1.055
1.478
1.621
1.4015
2.413
1.602
Wetopi
0.801
1.254
0.417
0.495
1.249
1.021
2.231
2.331
1.835
1.288916667
1.769
0.995
WPCycle
0.463
0.783
0.838
0.92
1.957
1.818
1.496
1.843
1.256
1.324083333
2.475
1.405
WPX
0.455
0.691
1.062
1.081
1.729
2.548
1.355
2.175
1.885
1.484166667
2.818
1.459
Discussion
Flywheel is the obvious standout being the fastest from 9/12 testing locations. DreamHost also stands out as the second fastest in many locations and the fastest in a couple. No company stood out as obviously the slowest around the world which is a good sign.
WPPerformanceTester Testing 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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
Results Table
Company
PHP Bench
WP Bench
34SP.com
10.868
468.164794
A2Hosting
10.875
527.1481286
ChemiCloud
11.437
323.5198965
Cloudways
8.222
484.9660524
DreamHost
7.01
560.2240896
EasyWP by Namecheap
10.277
522.7391532
Flywheel
11.446
297.7963073
GoDaddy
10.712
279.173646
GreenGeeks
9.211
1305.483029
highavailability.io
10.396
30.6335008
InMotion Hosting
10.633
1077.586207
IONOS Shared
10.238
490.6771344
IONOS WP
11.52
235.349494
Krystal Hosting
8.636
1191.895113
Lightning Base
6.369
870.3220191
RAIDBOXES
8.546
312.1098627
SiteGround
7.43
1406.469761
TVC.Net
8.592
1356.852103
Wetopi
12.801
744.6016381
WPCycle
12.164
629.7229219
WPX
8.533
761.614623
Discussion
LightingBase and DreamHost stand out as the fastest PHP Bench scores. The WP Bench provides some interesting insight about why it may not correlate to performance at scale. High Availability has the slowest score by an order of magnitude but that's almost surely due to the high availability architecture which allowed it to handle all the load testing with ease.
A2, GreenGeeks, Namecheap, Raidboxes and WPCycle all earned A+ ratings. 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
There are two levels of recognition awarded to companies that participate in the tests. There is no ‘best’ declared, it’s simply tiered, it’s hard to come up with an objective ranking system because of the complex nature of hosting. These tests also don’t take into account outside factors such as reviews, support, and features. It is simply testing performance as described in the methodology.
Top Tier
This year's Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance Award goes to the following companies who showed virtually no signs of struggle during the testing.
The following companies earned Honorable Mention status because they did very well and had a minor issue or two holding them back from earning Top Tier status.
This is the third year of participation for 34SP.com and it's fantastic to see them earn an honorable mention status this year. Last year they were almost there. A few spikes in the Load Impact testing kept them out of top tier status this time. Next year I hope to see them earning top tier status as they continue to improve.
A2 stepped up their game this year after struggling with Load Storm last year going from a 0.57% error rate to a perfect zero errors. With the uptime monitors showing 100 and 99.99% uptime, A2 earned Top Tier honors this year.
ChemiCloud is a first time participant and did an admirable job with perfect 100% uptime on both monitors. They handled the Load Impact test without issue but the Load Storm test proved to be a bit too much with a 2% error rate. I hope to see them return and make small improvements to do better next year.
Cloudways had perfect uptime at 100% on both monitors. The good news during the load tests were that they didn't have a single error. The bad news during the load tests was the response times increased substantially and the server slowed down under stress.
DreamHost did very well this year earning themselves an honorable mention. Their uptime exceeded the 99.9% threshold and their Load Storm test was excellent. The issue was Load Impact which slowed down and saw some small spikes as the test progressed but there were no errors. They also had some of the fastest response times on WebPageTest being first twice and second five times out of the 12 geographical locations.
It's nice to see a new entrant step into the ring. They almost participated last year, but finally bit the bullet in 2020. True to their name, they are one of the cheapest plans that competed in the cheapest price tier. They handled the Load Impact test well but sadly the uptime monitors were not kind where they experienced some network wide outages during the testing. The Load Storm test also proved to be too much for their containers but it failed gracefully with the requests that were making it through respond very quickly. I hope to see NameCheap return next year and deliver even better performance and value.
Flywheel's smallest plan got knocked down by Load Storm again. The test may be too much for the plan. The good news was the perfect uptime and being one of the fastest response times around the world a whopping nine out of twelve times.
A surprise from a company that is responsible for these tests ever being performed. GoDaddy recovered after last years less than ideal performance with a Top Tier performance this year. Their uptime was above 99.9% which was a problem last year. The load testing results didn't show much issue with the load this year once the security measures were worked around and they even handled the most total requests on Load Storm. Glad to see GoDaddy's engineering team doing well again.
GreenGeeks earned an honorable mention this year, a slight downgrade from last year's Top Tier honor. This was perhaps the most on the edge decision I've had to make. Their results on the load tests were good but the uptime monitors showed 99.96% and 99.894%. I added a third monitor this year in case something like this happened again to act as a tie breaker and it showed 99.9%, the exact threshold I keep between doing well enough and failure. Considering how borderline it was, I opted to give honorable mention status because the Top Tier companies unambiguously didn't struggle with any tests. Overall, it was a very good showing from GreenGeeks but they were kept out by the slimmest margin from earning Top Tier status this year.
Formerly Incendia Web Works, this multiple time participant is back in the Top Tier. Their 99.999% and 100% uptimes combined with doing well on the load tests showed they are highly available. The one test which made it clear that they were doing something different at this tier is the WPPerformanceTester WP Bench test where they have a very low score. One reason I don't use it as a meaningful metric is because of how architectures might impact the results. Latency between the database(s) and the web server will cause dramatic differences in the results and the load tests made it clear how real world performance may not correlate strictly with the WP bench result against other architectures. Great job by HighAvailability this year earning Top Tier status.
InMotion Hosting was brought down by Load Storm's test. Their uptime was above 99.9%. My contact there stopped responding and I wasn't ever able to get more details about any issues the server might have had security wise. Hopefully next time they will do better.
1&1's performance may have been marred by security measures which couldn't be disabled on both load tests. There may have been issues with handling the traffic too, it's hard to tell. But the problems on Load Storm and Load Impact tests held them back this year. The bright spot was the 99.99/100% uptime recorded by the shared plan.
1&1's performance may have been marred by security measures which couldn't be disabled on both load tests. There may have been issues with handling the traffic too, it's hard to tell. But the problems on Load Storm and Load Impact tests held them back this year. The bright spot was the 99.99/100% uptime recorded by the shared plan.
A second year entrant that almost earned honorable mention status last year, got over the hump and earned honorable mention status this year. The struggle was the Load Impact test again where last year it seemed to cause a bit too much stress, this year it was nearly under control with a spike keeping it just out of Top Tier status. The continued improvement from Krystal is excellent to see and I hope to see them be Top Tier next year.
Another year, another Top Tier honor for LightningBase. Perfect uptime. Only 15 errors total on Load Storm and perfect on Load Impact. LightningBase continue to be a model of consistent top tier performance. Congratulations for the longest streak of Top Tier honors of any company that has participated in these tests.
It's always nice to see a first time entrant just do flawlessly. With a whopping 0 total errors on their load tests and 99.999% and 100% on their uptime monitors, it's hard to ask for a better performance. Welcome to the show Raidboxes and congratulations on earning your first Top Tier honor, may you earn many more in the years to come.
SiteGround earned itself Top Tier status again this year after earning Honorable Mention status last year. The small issues with Load Storm tests seem to have disappeared and the uptime was excellent. Congrats to SiteGround on returning to Top Tier status.
TVC's second year participating. Last year they struggled with Load Impact, but they did excellent on both load tests this year. What held them back this year is they were just below the 99.9% uptime threshold at 99.87% and 99.84%. Hopefully it was just a little bit of bad luck and next year will see them earn Top Tier status.
Wetopi was another new entrant into the testing. As far as first performances go, Wetopi did pretty decently. Load Storm had a few errors. Load Impact had no errors but the response time elevated quite substantially by around 1s over the course of the test. The uptime was excellent. Handling Load Impact a little better would have earned them Honorable Mention status. Here's to hoping they improve earn some recognition next year.
The final new entrant in this years testing. Unfortunately WPCycle struggled with uptime and the Load Impact test. They did do very well on the Load Storm test which is a solid start considering it's often the most stressful load test. Hoping to see big improvements next year.
WPX Hosting earned another Top Tier award this year. There's not much to say, 99.999% uptime and almost perfect load tests will do that. Congrats on the repeat, keep up the excellent work.
About the Author
Kevin Ohashi
Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.
Please read the Methodology to fully understand the scope of these tests.
Note: Please check company profiles for summary of performances across multiple tiers. Some companies also offer promotions or coupon codes for a discount as well.
WooCommerce Hosting Performance Benchmarks is spawned off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks and is designed to create a consistent set of benchmarks showing how WooCommerce specialized web hosting companies perform. The focus of these tests is performance, not support, not features, not any other dimension. These benchmarks should be looked at in combination with other sources of information when making any hosting decision. Review Signal’s web hosting reviews has insights for some of the companies with regards to aspects beyond performance. That said, for the performance conscious, these benchmarks should be a good guide.
The major differences from the WordPress methodology are the following:
Setup
All tests were performed on an identical WooCommerce dummy website with the same plugins except in cases where hosts added extra plugins or code. The Storefront theme was used with the following sample products. The following Plugins were installed: Jetpack, WooCommerce, WooCommerce Admin, WooCommerce Services, WooCommerce Stripe Gateway, and WP Performance Tester.
WooCommerce Specific Settings were a US address, $USD, digital products, Stripe payment gateway, Storefront theme, automated taxes with Jetpack installed.
Load Storm
The process for LoadStorm was the unique WooCommerce specific test. There were four different profiles created and given their own user distributions (in % after profile), all with 5-10 second page think time. The test scaled from 10 to 1000 concurrent users over 40 minutes and stayed at 1,000 concurrent users for 20 minutes (60 minute test, 20 minute peak).
Profile 1 (20%): Buyer – Homepage, add item to cart, go to cart, checkout (doesn’t submit order)
GreenGeeks, Nestify, Pressable, Servebolt, SiteGround and Wetopi handled Load Storm without issue.
Seravo had similar issue in their other load tests in the WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks in the $101-200 tier which was a docker proxy bug that couldn't be resolved during the tests.
I decided to take a deeper look at the results and analyze the performance of loading HTML mime types, to ignore a lot of static assets which are cached and bring down average response times.
I broke it down by profile because each script is different in terms of which endpoints on WooCommerce they are hitting.
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.
Results Table
Company
Buyer Profile
Customer Profile
Browser Profile
Home Profile
GreenGeeks
698
908
463
470
Nestify
485
446
463
266
Pressable
504
511
102
89
Seravo
707
674
720
661
Servebolt
383
401
398
88
SiteGround
276
343
156
120
Wetopi
977
845
619
523
*Seravo included but high error rate makes this number not mean a whole lot.
What we can see from the results is that the homepage only (Visitor profile) is universally the fastest page for every company. That would be expected since the page should be cached and it's only hitting that single endpoint.
The second fastest profile in general seems to be the be the product viewer (Browser profile) who simply looks at different products on the site.
The Buyer and Existing Customer profiles appear to be the heaviest - although it's unclear one is obviously more stressful for WooCommerce based on the results. Both are having to deal with data being sent to the server and handled in a unique manner for each request.
It is reassuring to see that the generally expected outcome matches the reality. It's also nice to see the average response time under 1000ms for even the heavier pages.
K6 Testing Results
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
Average Response Time was actually Peak Average Response time in Load Impact.
Green Geeks, Nestify, Pressable, Seravo Servebolt and SiteGround all handled this test without issue.
Wetopi struggled a some and peak average load time was up to 1920ms.
Uptime Testing Results
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.
Results Table
Company
Uptime Robot
Hetrix
Alt Uptime Monitor
GreenGeeks
99.911
99.99
100
Nestify
100
100
100
Pressable
100
100
100
Seravo
99.997
100
100
Servebolt
99.583
99.99
99.99
SiteGround
99.996
99.99
Wetopi
99.993
99.98
100
Discussion
Servebolt was the fastest in three locations but had the lowest average response time around the world doing consistently well amongst its peers. Wetopi was the fastest in 4 locations and slowest in four locations, an interesting pattern. Nestify was the slowest in 7/12 locations which is a little disappointing but then it ends up being the fastest in Frankfurt and second fastest in Dulles.
WebPageTest Testing Results
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Results Table
Company
California
London
Frankfurt
Singapore
Mumbai
Sydney
Average
Virginia
Tokyo
Chicago
Israel
Rose Hill Mauritius
GreenGeeks
1.325
1.158
1.23
2.634
2.519
2.681
1.715166667
0.893
1.955
1.149
1.715
3.323
Nestify
2
2.686
0.661
3.9
4.229
3.49
2.501416667
0.703
2.974
1.281
2.521
5.572
Pressable
1.652
1.118
1.251
1.682
1.798
1.534
1.43475
0.786
1.528
1.111
2.071
2.686
Seravo
1.37
1.145
1.282
2.705
2.65
2.596
1.750833333
0.708
2.106
1.146
1.791
3.511
Servebolt
1.789
1.03
0.888
1.763
2.346
1.278
1.346083333
0.657
1.085
1.264
1.832
2.221
SiteGround
1.486
1.34
1.429
2.551
3.138
2.685
1.87325
0.738
1.612
1.048
1.994
4.458
Wetopi
1.707
0.594
2.103
4.315
1.447
3.445
1.854583333
0.948
2.935
1.517
1.158
2.086
Discussion
Every company was above the 99.9% threshold I would expect from any company. The only issue was a strange discrepancy between UptimeRobot and StatusCake on Servebolt's uptime. One showed a very low 99.583 and the other 99.99. The third monitor I setup showed 99.99%, so the issue appears to be with Uptime Robot.
WPPerformanceTester Testing 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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
Results Table
Company
PHP Bench
WP Bench
GreenGeeks
9.92
1402.524544
Nestify
7.483
809.7165992
Pressable
6.369
1317.523057
Seravo
8.094
400.8016032
Servebolt
3.271
2008.032129
SiteGround
9.493
425.8943782
Wetopi
11.343
576.3688761
Discussion
Servebolt was the obvious standout here. They had the highest queries per second and lowest PHP Bench time.
Green Geeks was the only company to receive an A+ rating.
Conclusion
There are two levels of recognition awarded to companies that participate in the tests. There is no ‘best’ declared, it’s simply tiered, it’s hard to come up with an objective ranking system because of the complex nature of hosting. These tests also don’t take into account outside factors such as reviews, support, and features. It is simply testing performance as described in the methodology.
Top Tier
This year's Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance Award goes to the following companies who showed virtually no signs of struggle during the testing.
The following companies earned Honorable Mention status because they did very well and had a minor issue or two holding them back from earning Top Tier status.
Green Geeks did well on every test. It didn't stand out in any of them as the fastest but it handled every test without failures and kept response times from increasing. It was also on the cheapest package competing. Well done and congratulations to Green Geeks for earning Top Tier honors.
Nestify had only three errors total in both load tests which is excellent. The average response time on Load Storm was a very fast 53ms. Capped off with perfect 100% uptime on both monitors was an excellent performance overall for Nestify. I'd like to see WebPageTest scores get faster but that's a minor complaint. It was a Top Tier performance and Nestify deserves the recognition.
Perfect uptime is a solid start. Pressable also had the second fastest Average Response Time on WebPageTest. It also was the fastest average response time on Load Storm. It was fastest on Browser profile as well as 1ms behind the fastest on the visitor profile. It was also the second fastest on Load Impact and handled the most requests. Pressable earned Top Tier performance for an impressive inaugural run on the WooCommerce tests.
Near perfect uptime with 100% and 99.97% was a solid start. The Load Impact test went smoothly with zero errors. However, an unfortunate docker proxy bug that couldn't be fixed caused a high number of errors on Load Storm knocking it out of any recognition. A solid start, hopefully next year the kinks will be worked out and we will see them do better.
Servebolt had the fastest WebPageTest average, fastest PHP Bench, highest WP Bench and fastest Peak Average Load Time on Load Impact. Throw in second fastest average response on Load Storm. Then on the broken down by script measuring time for key pages to load, they were the second fastest on both Buyer and Existing Customer profiles, third on Browser profile and first on the Visitor profile. Servebolt had an awful lot of fast across all the tests, a very well earned Top Tier performance.
SiteGround had solid uptime with 99.99% and 99.996%. It had the third fastest Load Impact Peak Average Load Time. It was also the fastest on the Buyer and Existing Customer profiles along with second and third on Browser and Visitor profiles respectively. SiteGround earned Top Tier recognition for its great performance.
A solid uptime was recorded at 99.993% and 99.98%. WebPageTest had Wetopi earning the fastest and slowest in some locations. Interesting pattern on the radar chart. Load Storm Wetopi held up but it was on the slower end in most measures compared to its competitors. Unfortunately, the problem was Load Impact which caused load times to peak at almost 2 seconds. It was a decent performance but there's still improvements to be made.
About the Author
Kevin Ohashi
Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.
Please read the Methodology to fully understand the scope of these tests.
Note: Please check company profiles for summary of performances across multiple tiers. Some companies also offer promotions or coupon codes for a discount as well.
WooCommerce Hosting Performance Benchmarks is spawned off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks and is designed to create a consistent set of benchmarks showing how WooCommerce specialized web hosting companies perform. The focus of these tests is performance, not support, not features, not any other dimension. These benchmarks should be looked at in combination with other sources of information when making any hosting decision. Review Signal’s web hosting reviews has insights for some of the companies with regards to aspects beyond performance. That said, for the performance conscious, these benchmarks should be a good guide.
The major differences from the WordPress methodology are the following:
Setup
All tests were performed on an identical WooCommerce dummy website with the same plugins except in cases where hosts added extra plugins or code. The Storefront theme was used with the following sample products. The following Plugins were installed: Jetpack, WooCommerce, WooCommerce Admin, WooCommerce Services, WooCommerce Stripe Gateway, and WP Performance Tester.
WooCommerce Specific Settings were a US address, $USD, digital products, Stripe payment gateway, Storefront theme, automated taxes with Jetpack installed.
Load Storm
The process for LoadStorm was the unique WooCommerce specific test. There were four different profiles created and given their own user distributions (in % after profile), all with 5-10 second page think time. The test scaled from 10 to 1000 concurrent users over 40 minutes and stayed at 1,000 concurrent users for 20 minutes (60 minute test, 20 minute peak).
Profile 1 (20%): Buyer – Homepage, add item to cart, go to cart, checkout (doesn’t submit order)
Lightning Base, WordPress.com, SiteGround, Pressable, and Servebolt all handled this test without issue.
ManagedWPHosting slowed down and had errors. Seravo had a bug which caused errors on a significant amount of requests but the ones that went through looked fine. GoDaddy slowed down and had errors on get_refreshed_fragment which is an important call to update the shopping cart. Nexcess had some wp-login issues on the majority of requests.
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.
Results Table
Company
Buyer Profile
Customer Profile
Browser Profile
Home Profile
A2Hosting
736
635
483
438
GoDaddy
391
497
252
334
GreenGeeks
1142
836
473
407
Lightning Base
783
645
479
407
ManagedWPHosting
6238
8006
784
783
Nexcess
742
702
735
667
Pressable
474
410
199
196
Seravo
501
601
579
140
Servebolt
270
270
270
159
SiteGround
318
288
254
195
WordPress.com
600
452
264
267
Similar to last year the home profile and browser profile seem to be the fastest in that order. These would be the most static and cachable pages since we are only looking. Also similar to last year it's not clear that the Buyer or Customer profile is universally more difficult for hosting companies to deal with. Both hit uncachable endpoints and should cause load.
Servebolt, SiteGround, GoDaddy, and Pressable are your fastest four on the Buyer profile
Servebolt, SiteGround, Pressable and WordPress.com are your fastest four on the Customer profile.
Pressable, GoDaddy, SiteGround, and WordPress.com are your fastest four on Browser profile.
Seravo, Servebolt, SiteGround, and Pressable are your fastest four on the Home profile.
GreenGeeks slowed down for the Buyer profile. ManagedWPHosting slowed down for the Buyer and Customer profiles.
K6 Testing Results
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
A2Hosting, GreenGeeks, Lightning Base, WordPress.com, SiteGround, Pressable, Nexcess, and Servebolt all handled this test without issue.
Seravo and GoDaddy were ok, relatively flat but a bit slower especially at at P95/P99 levels.
ManagedWPHosting slowed down during the test.
Uptime Testing Results
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.
Results Table
Company
Uptime Robot
Hetrix
Alt Uptime Monitor
A2Hosting
99.916
99.7539
100
GoDaddy
99.998
99.9989
100
GreenGeeks
100
99.9966
100
Lightning Base
99.991
99.9913
100
ManagedWPHosting
99.819
99.873
100
Nexcess
99.238
99.3906
100
Pressable
100
100
100
Seravo
99.995
100
100
Servebolt
100
99.9995
100
SiteGround
100
100
100
WordPress.com
100
100
100
Discussion
GreenGeeks, LightningBase, WordPress.com, Seravo, SiteGround, GoDaddy, Pressable, and Servebolt all had 99.99% uptime or higher.
A2Hosting, ManagedWPHosting and Nexcess had some downtime issues which caused it to drop below 99.9%
WebPageTest Testing Results
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Results Table
Company
Virginia
California
Salt Lake City
London
Frankfurt
Cape Town
Singapore
Mumbai
Tokyo
Sydney
Brazil
Dubai
Average
A2Hosting
1.298
1.7
1.767
1.512
1.741
3.015
2.7
2.465
2.127
2.439
1.891
3.273
2.160666667
GoDaddy
2.313
2.603
2.558
3.48
3.404
7.313
3.972
5.796
2.519
4.096
2.791
4.774
3.801583333
GreenGeeks
1.185
1.338
1.478
1.438
1.412
2.91
2.261
2.337
1.73
2.212
1.643
3.083
1.918916667
Lightning Base
1.35
1.463
1.361
2.147
1.85
2.618
2.31
2.619
1.496
1.971
1.718
3.217
2.01
ManagedWPHosting
1.44
1.96
2.103
1.259
1.061
1.95
3.969
1.834
2.575
2.699
2
7.033
2.49025
Nexcess
1.139
1.432
4.196
2.616
2.628
3.863
4.938
7.806
3.643
5.638
2.295
3.596
3.649166667
Pressable
1.246
1.29
1.605
1.195
1.57
3
1.923
2.083
1.649
1.997
1.489
2.704
1.812583333
Seravo
1.617
1.963
1.934
1.101
1.056
2.641
1.747
1.544
2.555
3.318
2.41
2.633
2.04325
Servebolt
1.108
1.317
1.489
1.3
1.72
1.998
1.213
1.537
1.145
1.432
1.193
2.919
1.530916667
SiteGround
1.021
1.057
1.165
1.382
1.439
2.897
2.878
3.145
2.063
2.31
1.815
3.137
2.02575
WordPress.com
0.894
0.941
1.177
0.96
0.875
2.018
0.903
1.337
0.896
1.014
0.911
1.672
1.133166667
Discussion
WordPress.com is an absolute standout here. It was the fastest in 10/12 locations. Servebolt was second fastest overall and in 6/12 locations.
On the other end, GoDaddy was the slowest in 6/12 locations and Nexcess was the slowest in 5/12 locations and they were the slowest and second slowest respectively.
Unsurprisingly, US and European locations tend to be much faster, other locations spread out considerably more based on the company.
WPPerformanceTester Testing 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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
Results Table
Company
PHP Bench
WP Bench
A2Hosting
4.32
758.1501137
GoDaddy
10.927
277.3155851
GreenGeeks
12.113
990.0990099
Lightning Base
6.632
748.502994
ManagedWPHosting
5.215
1579.778831
Nexcess
4.301
1597.444089
Pressable
4.134
1408.450704
Seravo
5.34
196.6181675
Servebolt
3.246
1481.481481
SiteGround
7.385
1658.374793
WordPress.com
4.116
2500
Discussion
The PHP Bench scores looked a lot faster than the normal WordPress counterparts. Servebolt had the fastest at 3.246 seconds. But WordPress.com, Pressable, Nexcess, and A2Hosting all had 4.x second speeds. ManagedWPHosting and Seravo had 5.x second speeds. Last year, only Servebolt was under 6 seconds. This year we have 7 companies under that mark. It's nice to see such huge speed increases.
The WP Bench was a run away with WordPress.com scoring 2500 which I believe is the fastest score I've ever measured in any test. Last year there was only two companies above 1400 queries per second. This year there are six companies.
ManagedWPHosting had the highest grade of B. Followed by Seravo with a C, A2Hosting,GreenGeeks,Servebolt D+, GoDaddy/WordPress.com D, and the rest getting Fs.
I really don't know what to make of these results, when so many companies are failing, I have to consider whether the test is useful, or are many companies not doing a good job securing the servers or are these measuring things which are beyond the hosting provider's scope and more on the user? Or is it something else? I don't have an answer, but I am publishing the results to add another data point to the discussion.
Conclusion
There are two levels of recognition awarded to companies that participate in the tests. There is no ‘best’ declared, it’s simply tiered, it’s hard to come up with an objective ranking system because of the complex nature of hosting. These tests also don’t take into account outside factors such as reviews, support, and features. It is simply testing performance as described in the methodology.
Top Tier
This year's Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance Award goes to the following companies who showed virtually no signs of struggle during the testing.
The following companies earned Honorable Mention status because they did very well and had a minor issue or two holding them back from earning Top Tier status.
A2Hosting put up solid load testing results. The K6 test was flat which is what we like to see. The Load Storm test was went relatively smoothly. Unfortunately there was some uptime issues which dropped the uptime below the 99.9% threshold required to earn any sort of recognition.
GoDaddy's first entry into the WooCommerce side of the benchmarks. Let's start with the good. 99.99% uptime. The K6 test was ok, the P95/99 were a bit on slower side. The big problem was the Load Storm test, there was a lot of errors on the get_refreshed_fragment calls which updates the shopping cart and it had a wp-login response time of 1354ms both of which knocked it out of earning any awards this year. I've always been impressed by GoDaddy's willingness to come back and keep trying to improve from the very first test I've ever run until now, so I hope they come back next year with an even better product.
GreenGeeks earned an Honorable Mention this year. They had 99.99% uptime. The K6 test was good and flat. The only thing holding them back this year was the Buyer profile was 1142ms. A very solid product that slowed down just a little bit too much to earn Top Tier marks this year.
Lightning Base earned Top Tier status. A solid 99.99% uptime rating. Very good and flat Load Storm and K6 results. It didn't stand out in any tests but handled everything very well and without any issues. A solid Top Tier performance.
ManagedWPHosting was a new entrant this year to all the benchmarks. The WooCommerce tests were a bit tough this year on them. Some maintenance issues caused uptime to drop below 99.9%. The K6 test slowed as did the Load Storm test which also had some errors. I hope to see them come back next year and show off some major improvements.
Nexcess was a first time entrant on the WooCommerce test. The best part was the K6 test which it did well on. Nexcess also had the third fastest WP Bench. The Load Storm test had a few errors especially on wp-login. But the biggest problem was the uptime dropping below 99.9% because of a caching bug. I'd like to see some big improvements next year to get them up to Top Tier status.
Pressable earned back to back Top Tier awards now. Perfect uptime. The fastest K6 test at every level. The second fastest Load Storm response time. It also had the fastest Browser profile and was top 4 on the other 3 profiles. The third fastest PHP Bench and third fastest WPT average response time. An excellent showing, well deserving of Top Tier recognition.
Seravo ran into the same error as last year, a Docker proxy bug which couldn't be fixed again. It had 99.99% uptime again. The K6 test was ok. It's a shame to run into the same problem two years in a row. Third time is a charm I hope.
Servebolt earned another Top Tier award this year. 99.999% Uptime. The fastest Load Storm average response time. Also the fastest wp-login, Buyer and Customer profiles and second fastest Home profile. A solid K6 test. The second fastest WPT results. The fastest PHP Bench. Clearly a Top Tier performance well earned.
SiteGround earned Top Tier status again this year. Perfect uptime. Error free K6 test with the third fastest average response time and second fastest P95/P99 response times. The third fastest average response time on Load Storm. The second fastest wp-login response time and it earned second or third fastest on every Load Storm profile. The second fastest WP Bench was a nice boost compared to last year too. Easily a Top Tier performance.
WordPress.com earned Top Tier status year. Perfect uptime. The second fastest K6 average response time. A solid Load Storm test. They also absolutely showed off on the WebPageTest results taking 10/12 fastest response times. The fastest WP Bench I've ever seen and the second fastest PHP Bench. A definite Top Tier performance.
About the Author
Kevin Ohashi
Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.
Please read the Methodology to fully understand the scope of these tests.
Note: Please check company profiles for summary of performances across multiple tiers. Some companies also offer promotions or coupon codes for a discount as well.
The Enterprise tier of these benchmarks is special in that companies are allowed to change configurations to optimize for performance because at this price tier it’s expected for customers paying a lot of money. All other price tiers test default configurations.
Servebolt submitted two plans, the Accelerated plan is utilizing their Accelerated Domains addon which adds performance, scalability and security enhancements.
CloudJiffy, Infomaniak, Presslabs, RAIDBOXES, Scaleforce, Seravo, Servebolt, Servebolt Accelerated, and WordPress VIP all handled this test without issue.
WPOven had some errors and slowed down.
It's interesting to see the wp-login average response times because it is guaranteed to hit the database to authenticate the request. The requests are also coming from all over the world, so keeping it fast for everyone is a challenge. Servebolt and Servebolt Accelerated had the fastest average at 189ms and 247ms respectively. WordPress VIP picked up the third fastest at 247ms.
K6 Testing Results
K6 is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.
CloudJiffy, Infomaniak, Presslabs, RAIDBOXES, Scaleforce, Seravo, Servebolt, Servebolt Accelerated, and WordPress VIP all handled this test without issue.
WPOven had some spikes.
This test really highlights how fast the CDNs are because static content should be cached and scalable without issue. Seravo had the fastest average response time in all tests across any tier this year at an incredibly fast 9ms. It was also the fastest at the P95 and P99 levels at 31ms and 41ms. It's also impressive that 6 (CloudJiffy, Infomaniak, Scaleforce, Seravo, Servebolt Accelerated, WordPress VIP) companies served 99% of the requests at 80ms of less.
Uptime Testing Results
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.
Results Table
Company
Uptime Robot
Hetrix
Alt Uptime Monitor
CloudJiffy powered by Jelastic
85.114
100
99.991
Infomaniak powered by Jelastic
85.086
100
100
Presslabs
97.818
100
99.983
RAIDBOXES
99.993
99.9922
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
100
100
Seravo
99.998
99.9827
Servebolt
100
100
Servebolt Accelerated
99.962
99.974
WordPress VIP
100
100
WPOven
99.981
99.9668
Discussion
RAIDBOXES, Scaleforce, Seravo, Servebolt, Servebolt Accelerated, WordPress VIP and WPOven also had over 99.9% uptime.
CloudJiffy, Infomaniak and Presslabs all had an SSL renewal bug which caused some downtime dropping them below the 99.9% threshold.
WebPageTest Testing Results
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Results Table
Company
Virginia
California
Salt Lake City
London
Frankfurt
Cape Town
Singapore
Mumbai
Tokyo
Sydney
Brazil
Dubai
Average
CloudJiffy powered by Jelastic
0.764
1.251
1.485
0.646
0.752
1.058
0.766
1.389
1.568
1.748
1.249
1.623
1.191583333
Infomaniak powered by Jelastic
0.849
1.336
1.593
0.603
0.675
1.096
1.34
1.142
1.716
1.849
0.896
1.664
1.229916667
Presslabs
0.591
0.673
0.859
0.646
0.661
2.014
0.569
0.879
0.772
0.859
0.976
0.939
0.8698333333
RAIDBOXES
1.087
1.07
1.122
0.572
0.587
1.254
1.133
0.866
1.475
1.904
1.281
0.809
1.096666667
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
1.027
1.063
1.157
0.602
0.671
1.022
1.056
0.904
1.234
1.425
1.11
1.169
1.036666667
Seravo
0.55
0.664
0.742
0.574
0.587
0.563
0.533
0.739
0.605
0.498
0.907
0.845
0.6505833333
Servebolt
0.684
0.695
0.794
0.662
0.667
0.696
0.58
0.717
0.659
0.656
0.713
0.706
0.68575
Servebolt Accelerated
0.677
0.683
0.783
0.673
0.67
0.609
0.571
0.616
0.608
0.678
0.75
0.698
0.668
WordPress VIP
0.778
0.667
0.952
0.736
0.658
1.299
1.07
1.226
0.951
1.036
0.781
1.391
0.9620833333
WPOven
0.709
0.804
0.96
1.074
1.067
1.782
1.392
1.579
1.088
1.33
5.143
1.582
1.5425
Discussion
Seravo had the fastest average response time globally at 651ms ekeing out the slimmest of margins against Servebolt Accelerated (668ms) and Servebolt (686ms).
WPPerformanceTester Testing 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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
Results Table
Company
PHP Bench
WP Bench
CloudJiffy powered by Jelastic
9.453
274.3484225
Infomaniak powered by Jelastic
7.574
656.167979
Presslabs
4.691
1336.898396
RAIDBOXES
4.109
825.7638315
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
8.155
385.653683
Seravo
5.487
201.9793981
Servebolt
3.29
1798.561151
Servebolt Accelerated
3.311
1897.533207
WordPress VIP
8.276
890.4719501
WPOven
0
318.3699459
Discussion
Servebolt and Servebolt Accelerated stand out as having the fastest PHP and WP bench scores.
WPOven doesn't have a PHP Bench score because PHP 8 which they run as default isn't compatible with the benchmark.
Seravo had the highest grade at C+ followed by RAIDBOXES's C, Servebolt Accelerated's C-, WordPress VIP's D+, Presslabs's D, Servebolt's D-. CloudJiffy, Infomaniak, Scaleforce and WPOven all earned F's.
It's interesting to note that this is the only tier where the majority of companies didn't earn a grade of F.
I really don't know what to make of these results, when most companies are failing, I have to consider whether the test is useful, or are many companies not doing a good job securing the servers or are these measuring things which are beyond the hosting provider's scope and more on the user? Or is it something else? I don't have an answer, but I am publishing the results to add another data point to the discussion.
Conclusion
There are two levels of recognition awarded to companies that participate in the tests. There is no ‘best’ declared, it’s simply tiered, it’s hard to come up with an objective ranking system because of the complex nature of hosting. These tests also don’t take into account outside factors such as reviews, support, and features. It is simply testing performance as described in the methodology.
Top Tier
This year's Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance Award goes to the following companies who showed virtually no signs of struggle during the testing.
The following companies earned Honorable Mention status because they did very well and had a minor issue or two holding them back from earning Top Tier status.
CloudJiffy was a first timer who really went for it. The K6 test was excellent with a 15ms average response time. It handled the Load Storm test without issue as well. The only problem was an SSL bug which caused downtime dropping it below the 99.9% threshold.
Infomaniak was a new comer to the benchmarks and jumped straight into the toughest tier. The load tests were handled well. It even had the third fastest P99 on the K6 test. The only problem was the uptime, an SSL certificate renewl bug kept it from staying above the 99.9% threshold.
Presslabs has been a regular at the Enterprise tier and I think this is the first time it didn't win Top Tier recognition. The highlight was probably the fact they were the only company to have 0 errors on both Load Storm and K6. Presslabs had the third fastest WP Bench. It had the fourth fastest WPT average. The only thing that held it back was the same bug across all tiers where the SSL certificate failed to renew properly and caused uptime to drop below the 99.9% threshold. One bug away from a Top Tier performance unfortunately.
RAIDBOXES stepped up to the Enterprise tier this year and showed they could hang with the biggest players and earned Top Tier marks. RAIDBOXES had 99.99+% uptime and the fastest response times in London and Frankfurt on the WPT test. Nice to see them doing well in their home turf. The rest of their results didn't stand out, but they were all solid. Nice to see they can scale and earn Top Tier marks.
Scaleforce earned Top Tier status again and stood out against it's Jelastic powered peers even. Scaleforce had the second fastest average response time on K6 only 2ms off first. It also was 1ms behind at the P99 level, the smallest margin possible keeping it away from first. It had the third fastest average response time on Load Storm as well. Throw in perfect uptime and you've got a winner, well done.
Seravo is now two for two on earning Top Tier awards at the Enterprise year showing great consistency. The K6 test was probably the most impressive part of Seravo's excellent performance. It was the fastest at all measured levels on K6: average, P95, and P99. It also had the fastest WPT average response time showing it can serve content globally fast. A Top Tier performance indeed.
Servebolt continues to stand out even amongst the best of the best and earned another Top Tier award. Perfect uptime. The fastest Load Storm response times generally and for wp-login. Fast and errorless K6 test. The fastest PHP Bench and second fastest WP Bench. Third fastest WPT average in a very narrow race for first. An easy Top Tier award.
Servebolt Accelerated earned Top Tier recognition for an impressive performance. The second fastest Load Storm average and wp-login response times. The second fastest WPT average. The fastest WP bench. The second fastest PHP bench. There's just a lot of first and seconds and it's because it was a Top Tier performance.
WordPress VIP earned yet another Top Tier award. Perfect uptime. Errorless and flat K6 test and excellent Load Storm tests. Nothing seemed to impact the quick performance which is exactly what you would expect from a Top Tier performer.
WPOven had a pretty disappointing showing this year after many years of doing well in lower price tiers. The uptime was good enough, but both load tests had either major or small issues.
About the Author
Kevin Ohashi
Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.
Please read the Methodology to fully understand the scope of these tests.
Note: Please check company profiles for summary of performances across multiple tiers. Some companies also offer promotions or coupon codes for a discount as well.
Servebolt submitted two plans, the Accelerated plan is utilizing their Accelerated Domains addon, which adds performance, scalability and security enhancements.
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.
Results Table
Company
Uptime Robot
Hetrix
Alt Uptime Monitor
CloudJiffy powered by Jelastic
85.077
100
100
Cloudways
100
100
Infomaniak powered by Jelastic
85.077
100
100
Presslabs
97.821
100
100
RAIDBOXES
99.992
99.9927
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
100
100
Servebolt
100
100
Servebolt Accelerated
99.961
99.9765
Discussion
Cloudways, RAIDBOXES, Scaleforce, Servebolt and Servebolt Accelerated all had above 99.9% uptime.
CloudJiffy, Infomaniak and Presslabs all had SSL certificate renewal problems which caused downtime to drop below 99.9%.
WebPageTest Testing Results
WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
Results Table
Company
Virginia
California
Salt Lake City
London
Frankfurt
Cape Town
Singapore
Mumbai
Tokyo
Sydney
Brazil
Dubai
Average
CloudJiffy powered by Jelastic
0.8
1.269
1.458
0.708
0.641
0.973
1.239
1.426
1.67
0.947
0.765
1.653
1.129083333
Cloudways
0.841
0.838
0.843
0.791
0.849
1.446
1.35
1.276
1.066
1.303
0.896
1.265
1.063666667
Infomaniak powered by Jelastic
0.825
0.791
1.584
0.682
0.716
1.141
1.23
0.759
1.588
1.818
1.266
3.352
1.312666667
Presslabs
0.682
0.641
0.863
0.674
0.623
2.021
0.665
1.029
0.879
0.996
1.272
0.848
0.93275
RAIDBOXES
1.065
1.113
1.15
0.585
0.617
1.305
1.049
0.933
1.415
1.843
1.335
0.789
1.099916667
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
1.039
1.03
1.111
0.586
0.67
1.051
1.153
1.05
1.249
1.408
1.191
1.096
1.052833333
Servebolt
0.669
0.691
0.825
0.658
0.565
0.67
0.644
0.776
0.633
0.604
0.686
0.721
0.6785
Servebolt Accelerated
0.674
0.679
0.906
0.61
0.63
0.553
0.616
0.667
0.667
0.765
0.64
0.708
0.67625
Discussion
Servebolt/Servebolt Accelerated stand out here with the Accelerated plan edging the regular one out by a mere 3 milliseconds average with the combination picking up 9/12 fastest results and 9/12 second fastest results.
WPPerformanceTester Testing 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 red in the chart, PHP Bench is blue.
Results Table
Company
PHP Bench
WP Bench
CloudJiffy powered by Jelastic
9.407
571.4285714
Cloudways
6.24
592.7682276
Infomaniak powered by Jelastic
8.631
1069.518717
Presslabs
4.882
1190.47619
RAIDBOXES
4.116
819.6721311
Scaleforce powered by Jelastic
7.925
1358.695652
Servebolt
3.246
1824.817518
Servebolt Accelerated
3.245
1904.761905
Discussion
Servebolt had the fastest scores on PHP and WP Bench with both plans being 1/2 with Accelerated taking the #1 spot in both tests. RAIDBOXES and Presslabs had PHP bench scores in the 4 second range which is fast.
In all previous tiers there was barely any A+ marks, however, at this tier everyone got them except Cloudways (B - supported older TLS) and Presslabs (A).
Servebolt Accelerated received the highest score at 95 which is the highest score of any plan in any tier (tied with Enterprise tier Servebolt Accelerated plan). The lowest score was 30 was a tie between CloudJiffy and Infomaniak.
I'm not sure how much value there is in this metric, but the results are here for people to look at and evaluate for themselves.
RAIDBOXES had the highest score at a C. Servebolt Accelerated had C-. Servebolt had a D-. Everyone else got an F.
I really don't know what to make of these results, when most companies are failing, I have to consider whether the test is useful, or are many companies not doing a good job securing the servers or are these measuring things which are beyond the hosting provider's scope and more on the user? Or is it something else? I don't have an answer, but I am publishing the results to add another data point to the discussion.
Conclusion
There are two levels of recognition awarded to companies that participate in the tests. There is no ‘best’ declared, it’s simply tiered, it’s hard to come up with an objective ranking system because of the complex nature of hosting. These tests also don’t take into account outside factors such as reviews, support, and features. It is simply testing performance as described in the methodology.
Top Tier
This year's Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance Award goes to the following companies who showed virtually no signs of struggle during the testing.
The following companies earned Honorable Mention status because they did very well and had a minor issue or two holding them back from earning Top Tier status.
CloudJiffy had the second fastest average response time in K6 and the second fastest P99 response time. It handled Load Storm well. The only problem was certificate renewal again for SSL which caused it to drop below the 99.9% level required to earn Top Tier status. An overall excellent performance marred by a single bug.
Cloudways earned itself Top Tier recognition. Perfect uptime. Error free load testing on both Load Storm and K6 which had response times so flat you would want to ride on a boat on it. It wasn't the fastest product, but it handled these tests without blinking and error. A Top Tier performance for sure.
Infomaniak had the third fastest average response time on the K6 with 15ms. It handled the Load Storm test without issue. The only problem was an SSL renewal problem which caused uptime to drop below the 99.9% level. A solid product with one bug that kept it from earning Top Tier status.
Presslabs has historically done very well in these tests. Presslabs put up excellent Load Test results in both Load Storm and K6. They were error free and excellent. The only thing that held this otherwise Top Tier performance back was an SSL certificate renewal issue which caused uptime to drop below the 99.9% level required to earn Top Tier status.
RAIDBOXES earned an Honorable Mention. The uptime was above 99.99%. They had an excellent K6 result. The only thing which held them back this year was the Load Storm wp-login response time on average being over 1000ms by 12ms. This was probably the closest performance between Top Tier and Honorable Mention status of any this year.
Scaleforce was a force to be reckoned with and earned Top Tier marks. Perfect uptime. The fastest K6 average response time and P99 response time. The third fastest Load Storm average response time and wp-login response time. An overall excellent performance.
Servebolt earned Top Tier marks again. This plan had the fastest Load Storm average response times and wp-login response times. Throw in perfect uptime and the second fastest WPT, PHP and WP bench scores (only slightly edged by the Accelerated product), it was easily a Top Tier performance.
Servebolt Accelerated easily earned Top Tier status this year. It had the second fastest Load Storm average response time and wp-login response time. It handled the K6 test with ease. It maintained uptime above 99.9%. The only issue that caused any downtime was a DNS entry mistake since it was using a subdomain on the primary domain. It also had the fastest WPT average response globally and the fastest WP and PHP bench scores.
About the Author
Kevin Ohashi
Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.
