Richard ChambersWe’re delighted to announce that for a second year in a row, our WordPress Hosting has been awarded ‘Top Tier’ status by Review Signal.
Their WordPress Hosting benchmarks are carried out annually, and we like them because they’re unbiased, based purely on performance – not affiliate commission!
There’s a problem with other web and WordPress hosting reviews. Many hosting companies run affiliate programs, so reviews are often skewed towards companies that pay the most, or more simply: pay the reviewer directly!
Kevin Ohashi from Review Signal does it differently. He tests different hosts by using an ‘example’ WordPress website, which is the same across the different hosting companies. This site is then subjected to a battery of independent performance tests. This way, the benchmarks are comprehensive and impartial.
So that’s why we’re so pleased to be shown as having the best WordPress hosting by Review Signal! Here’s how the tests went down…
LoadStorm results
Like it sounds, the tests by this company batter servers! LoadStorm is designed to simulate real users entering the site, when nothing is cached. But the 20i servers handled everything they could throw at us, thanks to our unique autoscaling tech.
They made a total of 327,000 tests with an error rate of less than 0.015%. Our average response time for a web page was 472ms – amazing under high load – and for the wordpress_login page it was 345ms.
Kevin said that we ‘handled the test with ease’, while other hosting was subject to limits or prone to errors.
K6 testing
Unlike LoadStorm, K6 (FKA Load Impact) is designed to test caching, by requesting the same page again and again. It would be putting StackCache – our NGINX WordPress caching plugin – through its paces.
They made 427,000 requests, with no errors at all. Our average response time was a remarkable 55ms! Other companies’ hosting experienced spikes and slowdowns which affected their results, while again, 20i handled the test without any issues.
Ditching the downtime
When it came to uptime, our WordPress hosting again performed really well: ‘perfect’ in the words of Kevin. The figures were taken from two monitoring companies: HetrixTools and Uptime Robot. For Hetrix, we managed 100% uptime, and for Uptime Robot it was 99.999% across the board. Gone are the days when you had to put up with frequent service outages. Downtime is virtually non-existent with 20i.
WordPress performance
Another two tests were done by WPPerformanceTester. WP Bench is used to test how many queries can be handled at once, and we got a great score of 489 per second.
The other benchmark involves the language WordPress uses. PHP Bench performs computational and database operations. Again its measured in seconds, and we got a low score (which is good!) of 9.289. That must be due to the way our team optimise PHP on our hosting platform.
SSL tests
The example WordPress website was also put through an SSL test. This was done by Qualys checking the certs’ support for protocols, key exchange and ciphers. Our SSLs received a grade of ‘A’.
Truly ‘top tier’ – try us for £1
We’re thrilled that we received ‘Top Tier’ status at Review Signal! 20i was said to have ‘virtually no signs struggle during the testing’.
Of course, performance alone isn’t the be-all and end-all of web hosting – but it is something that can be tested objectively. So the tests are definitely something to take into account if you’re considering changing your WordPress hosting provider. You can try our hosting now.
Migrating existing WordPress site to 20i is easy, and you can follow our tutorial below:
As the Review Signal tests are focused on performance, they don’t cover all the features of the package (like our WordPress Tools suite, for example). They also don’t take account of less tangible benefits like the quality of support: something we’re well-known for. It’s things like that which make 20i WordPress Hosting the best overall.
I hope that if you’re already a 20i customer you appreciate more than just the great performance: our support, the free features, the user experience, our ongoing development and overall value.
It’s the combination of all those things that makes 20i hosting truly ‘top tier’, and the best hosting available.
WordPress hosting reviews
While results like this make us smile, the WordPress hosting reviews that matter the most to us are from our customers. Read a selection Customer Reviews here.
Ben Perry
Joseph Simpson
Can you publish how these WordPress websites were set up? – Out of the box, or were special PHP settings set up, WP Cron handling externally managed? While the results are truly impressive, my own experience is not so wonderful. I have 146 sites and from time to time they fail to update and return a white screen, or simply fail to update a plugin and stay in that condition. They often take 10 seconds before they load as well. Not always, and generally performance is good. But it is not all wonderful. Just most of it. I still would not change provider, but I am in the real world, not the test world. I am also aware of the marketing initiative to pay someone to test your products and services. Was this wholly independent testing, or did you sponsor it?
Hi Mark,
We didn’t do anything special or different behind the scenes, it was all our standard WordPress Hosting platform. Kevin set up the site himself in an account we gave him. His full methodology can be found here https://wphostingbenchmarks.com/methodology/. It’s very in-depth.
No one sponsors the testing, that’s why we like it so much. It is 100% independent and based on data.
In terms of your own sites, there are so many factors that impact a WordPress powered site’s performance, from number of plugins, the plugins themselves, the theme, database bloat with drafts etc. I would recommend testing how your sites perform with some of these turned off or with an an alternative.
Thanks,
Matt