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

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

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 Static Testing Results

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

Results Table

Discussion

This test used Load Impact (predecessor to K6).

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

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. Result are measured in seconds.

Results Table

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 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

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.

SSL Testing Results

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

Results Table

Discussion

A's for everyone with A2Hosting, GreenGeeks, ManagedWPHosting, Servebolt and WordPress.com earning A+.

Internet.nl Testing Results

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

Results Table

Discussion

ManagedWPHosting had the top score at 73, closely followed by Servebolt at 68 and Seravo at 66. SiteGround was at the bottom with 30.

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

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.

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