The Companies and Products

LoadStorm Testing Results

Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.

Results Table

Discussion

CloudJiffy, Infomaniak, LightningBase, Pressable, Presslabs, Scaleforce, Servebolt and WPX handled this test without issue.

Nexcess had a couple spikes and a few errors. SaveInCloud had a few errors.

ICDSoft slowed down and had high error rate. IONOS slowed down. MDDHosting slowed down and had errors.

K6 Static Testing Results

K6 Static test is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.

Results Table

Discussion

CloudJiffy, Infomaniak, IONOS, LightningBase, MDDHosting, Pressable, Presslabs, SaveInCloud, Scaleforce, Servebolt and WPX all handled this test without any issues.

Nexcess had some errors, slowed down a little and had a few spikes,

ICDSoft had some errors.

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

Discussion

ICDSoft, LightningBase, MDDHosting, Nexcess, Pressable, Scaleforce, Servebolt and WPX all kept above 99.9% uptime.

CloudJiffy, Infomaniak, IONOS, Presslabs and SaveInCloud all had SSL issues which caused downtime to varying degrees.

WebPageTest Testing Results

WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world. Result are measured in seconds.

Results Table

Discussion

WPX stands out being the fastest in 7/12 locations and having the lowest average response time at 0.738 seconds. They were followed by Servebolt (0.822 seconds) and Presslabs (0.95 seconds).

At the other end you have Nexcess with the slowest average response time at 2.108 seconds average and slowest performance in 7/12 locations.

WPPerformanceTester Testing Results

WPPerformanceTester performs two benchmarks. One is a WordPress (WP Bench) and the other is a PHP Bench. 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.

Results Table

Discussion

Servebolt was the fastest PHP bench achieving the only sub 4 second performance across all the tests. Pressable and Nexcess achieved PHP bench scores in the 4 second range. Nexcess also had the fastest WP Bench just breaking 2,000 queries per second, followed by Servebolt at 1,745.

SSL Testing Results

The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

Results Table

Discussion

A's for everyone and an A+ for Servebolt.

Internet.nl Testing Results

The tool is available at https://internet.nl/test-site/.

Results Table

Discussion

Servebolt earned the highest rating at 68% while CloudJiffy, Infomaniak and SaveInCloud the lowest at 28%.

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.

Mozilla Observatory Testing Results

The tool is available at https://observatory.mozilla.org/.

Results Table

Discussion

C- for Servebolt and F's for every other company.

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.

Honorable Mention

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.

Individual Host Analysis