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, Cloudways, Infomaniak, Presslabs, Scaleforce, Servebolt and Servebolt Accelerated all handled this test without issue.

RAIDBOXES was a little bit slower than the competition and had wp-login response time just over 1000ms.

K6 Static Testing Results

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

Results Table

Discussion

Every company handled the K6 without 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

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. Result are measured in seconds.

Results Table

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 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 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.

SSL Testing Results

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

Results Table

Discussion

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).

Internet.nl Testing Results

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

Results Table

Discussion

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.

Mozilla Observatory Testing Results

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

Results Table

Discussion

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.

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