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 all handled this test without issue.

Nexcess had couple small spikes in performance causing some errors but otherwise performed well. SaveInCloud had the most borderline performance in perhaps all of this years testing, the error rate was 0.12% where no company above 0.1% error rate gets Top Tier status on this test.

ICDSoft slowed down (CPU/RAM limit I believe) which causes the response time and error pattern we see. IONOS slowed down, we see average response time substantially increase and wp-login exceed 1500ms. MDDHosting's performance slowly degraded showing 500 errors as load increased.

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 issue.

SiteGround took a little bit to warm up but ultimately handled the test well.

ICDSoft appeared to throttle but not degrade performance. Nexcess had a few errors and slowed down slightly.

Overall, everyone seems to have handled this test quiet well.

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, and Servebolt all had 99.9%. Impressively all of these except Nexcess had over 99.99%.

WPX had a typo with a DNS record that I personally screwed up which caused one uptime monitor to not properly track uptime because one record had the wrong IP address. 2/3 uptime monitors were able to failover and track the correct uptime, the other reported a wildly inaccurate uptime because of my mistake, so I am not penalizing the low score seen and giving them full marks for their performance.

I didn't expect SSL renewal problems to impact so many companies, but CloudJiffy, Infomaniak, IONOS, Presslabs and SaveInCloud all suffered downtime from SSL issues.

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

Rocket stands out being the fastest in 5/12 locations and second in 4/12 locations. WPX also was the fastest in 5/12 locations and second in 3/12 locations earning the second fastest average response time.

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

A2, Pressable and WordPress.com stand out on the PHP Bench finishing in under 5 seconds. WordPress.com also has one of the highest WP bench of any company in any tier this year, one of the highest scores I've ever seen.

SSL Testing Results

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

Results Table

Discussion

A2 Hosting and WordPress.com earned A+, everyone else earned an A except Rocket which earned a B for supporting TLS 1.0/1.1.

Internet.nl Testing Results

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

Results Table

Discussion

Rocket and Seravo scored the highest while CloudJiffy and Infomaniak scored the lowest. It's interesting to see no company is scoring very highly on this test. One possible explanation is that some of the settings are more user driven than host driven.

Mozilla Observatory Testing Results

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

Results Table

Discussion

Similar to the Internet.nl test, we see results not very high including a lot of F grades (8/12) with the highest being a C for Seravo and C- for A2 Hosting.

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