Important!
There’s an updated, vastly expanded version of this speed test comparison, to find the fastest WordPress hosting. Check it out!
In this mammoth, epic managed WordPress hosting comparison, I share with you who I’ve found to be the fastest managed WordPress hosting provider. I ‘ll pit WP Engine vs Flywheel vs Media Temple and Synthesis. An exciting fight for sure!
Read on for answers! Plural, because sadly there isn’t a single, easy answer to a seemingly straightforward question:
“Who’s the fastest managed WordPress hosting provider?”
But I’ll do my best to give you a foundation for you to base your hosting choice upon. I have put a LOT of work into researching, testing and writing this blog post. Please help me share it, so more people can benefit from it! Please feel free to use the sharing buttons. Thanks!
First up: I’ve recently reviewed both Media Temple’s Premium WordPress (that I’m hosted on now) as well as WP Engine.
For years, I was hosted on Media Temple’s (gs) Grid shared hosting platform. Since 2007 in fact. Apart from the early bug-ridden years of the Grid, I’ve been a happy camper. But the Grid has always been a bit on the slow side. That’s due to its clustered architecture: The databases and file storage being on separate boxes introduces latency. There are many benefits to such a setup, but speed isn’t one of them;)
So when Media Temple announced their new Premium WordPress hosting product, I was keen on trying it. So I signed up and moved a couple of sites over.
Premium WordPress indeed felt faster. But I wanted to measure it. And I wanted to know how fast Premium WordPress is, compared to competing Managed WordPress hosting providers: WP Engine vs Flywheel and Synthesis hosting.
When you’re paying a premium, you naturally wanna make sure you’ll get the best deal available.
So I set out on a quest to do a managed WordPress hosting comparison of:
- Media Temple’s Premium WordPress (a new entry from a well-established host)
- WP Engine (the undisputed leader in managed WordPress hosting)
- Flywheel (a relatively new player in the managed WordPress hosting game)
- Synthesis (by Copyblogger – makers of the Scribe SEO / content marketing copywriting plugin, plus Genesis and StudioPress WordPress themes)
And since I was on Media Temple’s (gs) Grid for so many years, I decided to also throw the Grid into the mix as well, even though it’s a “shared hosting” plan. I wanted to see the concrete performance differences between typical shared hosting and managed WordPress premium hosting.
How well would Media Temple’s inexpensive (gs) Grid fare, when compared to the much more expensive hosting plans of WP Engine, Flywheel, Synthesis and Media Temple’s recent Premium WordPress? The latter being the best deal of the bunch at 3 sites for $29 a month Update: Media Temple has revised their WordPress hosting pricing, and are now even more competitive in the managed WordPress hosting area. Still, the Grid sports 100 sites for $20 a month!
Let’s see! The answer to that question probably isn’t what you expected! Read on for the low-down:
Setting up the test
Any host can be fast, but few will continually be fast and resilient when stressed, aka hit with intense traffic and/or is running a heavy, resource-hungry site.
It’s like the cook who is good at cooking but can only prepare four dishes an hour.
As a theme I chose TwentyFourteen, as a fair, well-coded standard theme.
To put some strain on the servers, I created 1500 blog posts with a dummy content plugin, and set up the front page to display 100 blog posts.
I also installed the following plugins:
- Akismet. Comes with WordPress by default.
- Gravity Forms. I never use WordPress without it.
- SlideDeck (the full Developer+Professional monty) is so incredulously server-taxing for what it does.
- WooCommerce. Also a somewhat heavy plugin.
- WordPress SEO. Just because. Everyone’s using it. Therefore.
- Jetpack. I can’t imagine running a WordPress site anno 2014 without Jetpack.
I activated all of Jetpack’s many modules, except for the Infinite Scroll and Photon modules. Infinite Scroll would interfere by lazy loading a small amount of posts instead of all 100. Photon is an image hosting CDN (content delivery network) and would also interfere with the test.
Meet the contenders!
Premium WordPress by Media Temple
I’ve already reviewed Media Temple’s new Premium WordPress quite extensively. Read it for the low-down on Premium WordPress.
WP Engine
I’ve also reviewed WP Engine extensively very recently. Go check that one out as well.
Automated Upgrade Protection by WP Engine
WP Engine sports Automated Upgrade Protection. Before updating the WordPress core to a new version, WP Engine takes a backup snapshot. Then they do the update. After that, they compare your site to the backup snapshot. If all the code is executed properly, and your site is functioning as it did before the update, fine. If it isn’t – if there’s 404 errors or the dreaded “white screen of death” – your site is immediately downgraded to the snapshot version, and all will be working again.
That’s automatic WordPress updates done right me thinks.
Flywheel
Flywheel is da flyyy sh*t. No, really… I’m serious! Flywheel is hip. They have a hip control panel! Flywheel’s foundation is in every respect a novel, fresh new take on managed WordPress hosting. Flywheel is aimed squarely at web designers working for clients. You can create free development sites and transfer the payment role to your client once the site goes live. Pretty neat huh?
I like Flywheel. Their approach is fresh.
Synthesis
A product of Copyblogger, Synthesis is a force to be reckoned with. Their focus is on security and speed.
Instead of a custom, proprietary caching mechanism, Synthesis has instead chosen to rely on the widely respected caching plugin: W3 Total Cache.
W3 Total Cache is a great caching plugin. But let me share a secret with you: I hate dealing with cache plugins and their gazillion options.
In all honesty and frankness: I hate caching overall. As a web designer I’ve wasted so many hours throughout the years, either fooling around with cache settings or solving problems that after much bothersome troubleshooting boiled down to some caching-related issue: cache-files not getting cleared, or stubbornly stuck browser cache files being ridiculously difficult to get rid of.
Fortunately, Synthesis offers a simple settings file for W3 Total Cache. Basically it activates the Page Cache and Browser Cache modules, and leaves the rest of the modules disabled. Very standard caching settings.
So despite my initial rise in blood-pressure, it quickly returned to normal again. Caching on Synthesis is easy. And if you’re a control freak, you may enjoy having a say in how your sites are cached. That’s not a given! Media Temple, Flywheel and WP Engine offers zero cache customization: it’s just set up the way it is.
Shared or VPS?
Note that Synthesis offers four different plans. The Starter pack being the only one of them that isn’t a VPS. Starter is a shared plan (you’re sharing an aquarium with many other fish). VPS stands for Virtual Private Server (a deluxe penthouse aquarium – shared with a few other wealthy fish – but you have your own, closed compartment). A VPS is the next finest solution, short of a real dedicated server (your very own aquarium / casa del imperio del rey).
This test is based on Synthesis Hosting’s smallest VPS plan – not their Starter plan.
The speed results – Who’s the fastest?
Before I share my comparison Pingdom findings with you, I’ll also divulge my experiences creating the 1500 blog posts using the dummy content plugin.
I didn’t create 1500 blog posts in a single run. That would be insane. Instead, I timed how long it took each host to create batches of 100 and 200 dummy blog posts. I then calculated the average for each.
I did this test because it measures raw server power and speed. This is an action that cannot be cached! The results apply most to navigating the WordPress admin, since it’s highly dynamic, hence difficult to cache.
Media Temple Premium WordPress:
100 posts: 25 seconds.
200 posts: 44 seconds.
500 posts: timed out / got stuck.
WP Engine:
100 posts: not tested.
200 posts: 9 seconds.
500 posts: 23 seconds.
Flywheel:
100 posts: 4 seconds.
200 posts: 7 seconds.
500 posts: 15 seconds!
Synthesis:
I got access to Synthesis later than the other hosts, and forgot to time creating the dummy blog posts. Sorry. But subjectively speaking; Synthesis was definitely on par with WP Engine and Flywheel.
Media Temple (gs) Grid:
100 posts: took 29 seconds.
200 posts: timed out / got stuck.
500 posts: not tested.
The managed WordPress hosting comparison WINNER in this preliminary round?
Flywheel, hands down. Bravo Flywheel! WP Engine was also fast, but I experienced some weird display issues (css gone mia) in the WordPress admin. Maybe their caching acting up or being too aggressive? I’ve seen “flash of unstyled content” happen on their own company website (LINK) so it wasn’t a one-off issue I believe.
The Leeeewser?
Media Temple. Shame on you guys! You know I love you… but this is disturbing results!
To be fair… it seems like Media Temple has focused more on frontend performance than backend (aka wp-admin) performance. Perhaps the above test challenges the very Achilles heel of Media Temple’s clustered (non-VPS) network-based setup?
To make sure it wasn’t just a one-off occurrence, I redid the tests later. The results were the same, only fluctuating a few seconds plus minus. So I added them to the earlier measurements and calculated new average values for even higher accuracy.
And now, without further ado:
The results of this epic managed WordPress hosting comparison escapade!
Important!
I’ve just done a fully updated, vastly expanded 2017 version of this speed test comparison, to find the fastest WordPress hosting of 2017 – check it out!
Who’s delivers the fastest managed WordPress hosting? Let’s take a look at the…
Pingdom test results
While the dummy blog post creation test mostly gives an indication of the WordPress admin speed, the Pingdom test gives you a better image of the performance your website visitors will experience, when they browse your website.
To be fair to each host, I’ve chosen the most favorable response time interval for each. Hosting uptime, downtime and response times can fluctuate. I didn’t want any host to be at a disadvantage because of some abnormality.
Mind you: these response times are a bit high overall, for each host. Remember: the test is based on a site loading 100 blog posts on the front page!
| Overall Average | Slowest Average | Fastest Average | Uptime | |
| Flywheel | 1.877 ms | 3.320 ms | 1.418 ms | 99,95% |
| WP Engine | 879 ms | 953 ms | 839 ms | 99,90% |
| Synthesis | 880 ms | 931 ms | 844 ms | 99,99% |
| Synthesis (without W3 Total Cache) | 1.675 ms | 2.441 ms | 1.524 ms | 99,99% |
| Media Temple Premium WordPress | 1.718 ms | 2.272 ms | 1.455 ms | 99,70% |
| Media Temple (gs) | 4.418 ms | 7.033 ms | 3.516 ms | 99,85% |
| Media Temple (gs) (with W3 Total Cache) | 1.800 ms | 2.396 ms | 1.522 ms | 99,95% |
Synthesis did really well! Even without caching, they performed on par with Flywheel and Media Temple’s Premium WordPress. That’s impressive!
Once caching is turned on, Synthesis rivals WP Engine in speed.
So (maybe) it all boils down to this scenario:
Synthesis vs WP Engine
If you’re looking at pure performance, the choice is between WP Engine or Synthesis. But the world ain’t black & white. This isn’t Synthesis’ Starter plan. It’s their beginner VPS plan, the Professional one, at $97 per month, for a single site. Not exactly a bargain if you ask mel;) WP Engine’s starter plan is just $29 a site a month. So WP Engine it is then. Right?
Well, if you look at Media Temple’s WordPress hosting and consider that you’re getting 3 sites for $29 [updated pricing!] with performance as good as Flywheel’s – but at a better price: you have the answer to why I’m still on Premium WordPress until further notice:)
(or my yearly renewal is due)
Media Temple’s (gs) Grid vs the world
But then I got an idea! Why not install W3 Total Cache on Media Temple’s (gs) Grid, to see how fast it can become, with W3 Total Cache installed?
To make my life simple, and the comparison fair, I took the W3 Total Cache settings file (the shared hosting version) that I got from Synthesis – and boom! I was up’n’running: my Grid was now cached.
The result? W3 Total Cache (simple page caching and browser caching) on the inexpensive (mt) Grid, made it perform as fast as (mt) Premium WordPress and Flywheel! At least the front end. The WordPress admin is just as slow as it’s always been (it can’t be cached).
That’s all folks! Feel free to share your hosting experiences and thoughts on these results. Comment below!
Important!
I’ve just done a fully updated, vastly expanded 2017 version of this speed test comparison, to find the fastest WordPress hosting of 2017 – check it out!
krishna says
In terms of speed WP Engine and Flywheel is the best and also when you compare these two managed hosting provider with any managed wordpress hosting provider they excel in any condition
ruangfoto.com says
Hello. I’m using Flywheel for now. The interface is just great and the support by chat/email is very fast and usefull.
Oliver Nielsen says
Thanks for sharing your very positive Flywheel experience with us!
Oliver
teknisipintar says
I will migrate my blog to VPS but I don’t know about that at all, so I will chose managed wordpress but it so expensive…. so have you idea for that?
Oliver Nielsen says
Depends on your needs. Can you elaborate? Give me some more details about why’re considering migrating your blog to a VPS. You need more control? More power? Speed?
=)
Oliver
Parker says
Right now my website is on a cheap web host, and although I have never seen any downtime, I am always disappointed with my Pingdom test results and /wp-admin takes 2+ seconds to navigate through. It bugs me a lot because I work a lot on the back end as admin. Additionally when browsing any of the pages in incognito, my website pauses for 3~5 seconds as “waiting for response” at the bottom left on Chrome browser.
I get about 9-10K pageviews per month.
Should I try Flywheel’s wordpress hosting Tiny ($15/mo) or Media Temple’s managed WordPress Personal ($20/mo) or something else that you’d recommend?
PS: I also need about 3 emails hosted on my domain. My current web host provides unlimited email accounts. I have heard that these premium wordpress hosts do not provide email? Is that so?
Thanks
Oliver Nielsen says
Hi Parker
Thanks for asking!
Of the two you mention, I’d go with Flywheel in your case. I was impressed with the speed of particularly the WordPress admin, there. Another option, though more expensive, is WP Engine. Also good.
The reason some (not all) managed WordPress hosting companies do not offer email, is because email hosting can potentially slow down the web server. So, if it’s a good host, they’ll at the very least separate it, hosting email on separate servers. That costs money, and it’s difficult to invent and innovate in that field, as Google and other email providers does a great job already. So, what many do, is recommend – or even (as in Media Temple’s case) partner with, Google, offering Google Apps email, as part of the hosting package.
You can also try running the free P3 Profiler plugin. It helps you see how your theme and plugins are influencing your page speed load times. Often, a plugin is to blame. Note that this is also true for your WordPress backend/admin, which typically gets slower and slower the more heavy plugins we install and activate on our sites.
I say “heavy” because the sheer number of plugins one has activated at any given time, isn’t a good measure of the impact it has on the server. You can literally have several hundred plugins active, with little impact on your site load speed. While, on the other hand; one heavy plugin, can slow it down to a halt. WooCommerce + extensions comes to mind. Same does WPML. SlideDeck also comes to mind.
Just thought I’d mention it:)
Oliver
Caraspot says
I will migrate my blog to VPS but I don’t know about that at all, so I will chose managed wordpress but it so expensive…. so have you idea for that?
Oliver Nielsen says
I have personally been glad with Media Temple’s Grid (aff. link) for years, so maybe try that? Not expensive for hwta you get, lots of power, little complexity.
Have you considered that?
=)
Oliver
Dorian says
Hello. I’m using Flywheel for now. The interface is just great and the support by chat/email is very fast and usefull.
Oliver Nielsen says
Hi Dorian
Thanks for sharing your experience with Flywheel!
Oliver
Peter Paul says
Nice comparison. We used to be with WP Engine, but their price is just high and the site is not performing well. Are they still charging based on the number of hits, WPEngine that is? Have to transfer to another more affordable wordpress hosting. Probably we’ll try Flywheel next. I’m still checking around.
MaryJo says
Great post, really appreciate the insights.
Anyone has experience with Godaddy Managed WordPress hosting site speed? They claim to be really FAST according to the independent test, ” we had Cloud Spectator, an independent IT and cloud computing testing firm, test and monitor the top Managed WordPress hosting providers to determine the best web hosts.”
Their performance is compared against big names such as WPEngine, WEbSynthesis, Flywheel, Pagely, Bluehost etc.
click the SEE LATEST RESULTS button at this page for their site speed performance test
https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/wordpress-hosting.aspx#performance
Would appreciate any feedback, their pricing seems very reasonable.
https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/wordpress-hosting.aspx#performance
Oliver Nielsen says
Hey MaryJo
Rumor (speculation) has it, that Media Temple’s WordPress hosting is based on the infrastructure of GoDaddy’s servers. The caching mechanism is very similarly looking, and the IP-adresses of the servers are belonging to GoDaddy – not Media Temple.
So I’d say (guesswork only) that GoDaddy’s speed results would be quite similar to those I found on Media Temple’s WordPress hosting.
=)
Oliver
Alessandro says
Hello,
interesting result, but I advice you to test also Lightning Base and Pressidium, they are other two great WordPress Managed Hosting, with good prices 😉
Oliver Nielsen says
Grazie for the tips Alessandro! I have Pressidium on my list of hosting companies to test, but Lightning Base wasn’t on it. They are now.
=)
Oliver
Aris says
Thanks for the info!
I need to give WPEngine a try. I tried out FlyWheel and although they have a sleek interface, they messed up my migration and couldn’t even log into wordpress (funny thing for a wordpress optimized host).
Oliver Nielsen says
Hi Aris!
Thanks for sharing your input on Flywheel with us! Feel free to elaborate. Curious to hear more.
Oliver
Will says
Did you have flywheel’s CDN enabled (extra $10 a month on their basic plan) for the test? I’m just curious how that compares.
Oliver Nielsen says
Hi Will
Nope, no CDN’s on any of the hosts. A CDN will mostly (almost exclusively) help with download speed of larger, static files, like images files and downloads by the way.
=)
Oliver
Shawn says
Very well conducted test. Kudos as it must have taken quite a while to gather all the results. We are a small creative firm and we have bounced around quite a bit when it comes to finding a hosting company that really fit our needs. After all we are designers not server administrators! We had tried everything from a pretty beefy VPS, RackSpace Cloud Sites, shared hosting, etc. Finally we put a customer site on Synthesis and it ran head and shoulders above the rest of our sites. At this moment we were sold on “WordPress Specific” hosting but Synthesis was much to expensive to move all of our customers over to them.
In the end we landed on Media Temple’s WordPress Premium, we believe it has the best price to performance ratio. We first moved our site http://www.cruxcreative.com as a test prior to moving any clients to ensure it was as good as advertised, and it was! We now have over 20 sites on this platform and a can’t tell you how much stress has been relieved and how much time has been saved in migrations, security issues, customer complaints, etc. It really does have the perfect mix of security, speed, ease of use, and of course a good price point. We love the built in migration tool (makes moving sites a breeze) and one click staging sites, although the staging sites do need some work to ensure they push ALL content to your production site but that’s another story. Also 30 days of automatic backups is pretty awesome too in our book, and support has been fantastic except for one specific late night tech… All in all give Media Temple’s option it a shot if you are on the fence.
OJAS says
Nice comparison, specially i like Wp engine. earlier i used it, no downtime and security problem as well as speed is very fast.
Oliver Nielsen says
Thanks for chiming in! Good to hear.
Michael Oberpetinger says
Why are some WordPress Hosting so expensive?
Is there really such a difference between something like Websynthesis.com ($47) Pagely.com (24$) or WpEngine (29$) and something like MyWoHo.com (1$) or Bluehost.com (3.5$)?
Or is the reason why most blogs list only companies like websynthesis, pagely or wpengine the fact that this companies earn 30-40 times what others earn and that they can spend this money in advertising?
Oliver Nielsen says
Hi Michael
Yes there’s a huge difference. When buying hosting you’re buying resources. System resources to run your site efficiently.
When a host sells cheap hosting they can do so because they’re slicing up the pie into smaller slices. You get less resources.
What you lose is typically speed and/or stability and scalability. By the latter I refer to the experience of having a fast site, only to see it slow down when faced with a traffic spike. I can tell you it’s frustrating to see your site get noticed, only to see it slow down to the point of being almost inaccessible.
So yes: good hosting pays off.
That said: if you’re technically inclined, you can opt to just purchase the resources, and not the service and support, and thereby save yourself a lot money. Digital Ocean sells server resources on demand. But you gotta be prepared to be a server admin:)
I myself would be able to setup a server at Digital Ocean, but I don’t consider myself to be a sysadmin kind of guy, so I prefer to pay for managed, quality hosting, where most of the server maintenance tasks are handled by… Sysadmins;)
Michael Oberpetinger says
In the last month I made some tests with MyWoHo, WebSynthesis and WpEngine.
I tested the performance (pingdom.com), the support and the backup function.
What I can tell you is that 90-95% of people that are hosting their WordPress Sites on expensive Hosting provider are wasting their money. If you have a few thousands of monthly pageviews, you really don’t need to spend 47$.
The fact is that blogs advertise providers with the highest affiliate commissions. It’s normal that they prefer wpengine with a 200$ affiliate commission instead of MyWoHo with no affiliate program.
Oliver Nielsen says
Hi Michael
You may have a point, regarding the affiliate programs. And for sure, the affiliate commisions are calculated into the marketing costs, which again are calculated into a price; the service needs to generate a profit. But I’m not too sure it’s the only difference in popularity, at all. First of all: the product needs to be great, to justify the premium pricing. Secondly, there are plenty NOT very popular hosts out there, with aggressive affiliate programs. Having an affiliate program does not guarantee success. If you think that, go on and create some product or service + an affiliate program and get back to me when you’ve become rich doing so 😀
Media Temple only recently bumped up their affiliate commission to $200. The fact that you know that makes me suspicious you yourself is an affiliate of theirs? ;-p
Anyway, what were your Pingdom test results?? Do tell man! We’re all ears here:) But did you also test the resilience? Your remark about “a few thousand monthly pageviews” indicates you’re not so interested in stability/resilience? I’ve tried multiple cheap hosts who were fast until some load was put on the server, then everything slowed down. A lot.
One should never think “Bah! what da heck, I only have a few thousand (or hundred even) monthly visitors. No need for premium hosting”. What will happen (and has for myself, clients, friends) at some point is: your site will be in the news, on the radio, mentioned on a big media site, portal or similar, or via some other route attract EXACTLY that traffic you’ve been working so hard to earn via content creation, marketing, promotion, etc. Yet, there you are, with a site that’s down, or “sports” 30+ second pageloads. So sad. And yes: I’ve seen it, and also experienced it myself.
There are two things I can’t stand:
1. poor hosting.
2. poor hosting at premium pricing.
So yes: it all has to balance out. I want what I pay for. Else there’s no point.
Popo says
Here’s the problem with all of these special WordPress-Hosting deals: They all use their own caching and their own CDN’s.
How much of that is their “special sauce”?
As you said in the article, adding W3TC to a standard WordPress install on MT’s basic grid-service, seems to achieve similar performance to WPEngine.
The real test therefore is not with static content. It’s with dynamic content which can’t easily be cached.
Unless I’m missing something, all of this article’s tests play directly into the “easy” optimization strategies of caching and CDN delivery, and avoid the “hard” tests of raw CPU power and processing bottlenecks.
WordPress is far from being just a standard “blogging” tool anymore. If you look at all the really new/exciting theme work being done, you can see it’s being used as a very versatile/extensible platform for help desks, real estate listings, classified ads, subscription content sites, etc. So when a “WordPress Host” says they “do” WordPress, and then brags about the “low-hanging fruit” optimization strategies like caching and CDN’s — color me unimpressed.
Talk to me about the actual hardware architecture and I’ll start paying attention.
And that’s the issue. We see some reference to Nginx and Varnish and what have you. But this is a measurable question of metrics. When I visit WPEngine’s site, or FlyWheel’s site, I see things discussed in decidedly non-technical, non-measured terms. This is giveaway number-one that these guys are selling a whole lot of snake oil.
My two cents. (And I’d love to be wrong).
philby says
Most of the Managed WP providers seem to heavily optimize front-end speed and scalability, which is of course not a bad thing at all.
Using a run-of-the-mill hosting, even one based on NGiNX, and throwing in W3 Total Cache with static page caching, database and object caching will give you a speedy site, but only as long as there are not that many concurrent visitors. Even small traffic spikes will make your site be extremely slow, or even crash and burn. I’ve been able to inadvertendly completely crash an entire Plesk-based shared hosting server doing a 100 VU blitz.io test. Another example: even with Varnish and Memcache, a GoGeek SiteGround WordPress install is going to stop responding with more than 25 concurrent users. That definitely is not the case with WPEngine, (mt), GoDaddy, et al.
From a sheer “how fast is the real server” perspective, I’ve been most impressed by FlyWheel and Kinsta. EasyEngine on Digital Ocean or Linode comes very close to this performance – there’s simply no server-based backups, staging and GIT, unless you add them yourself.
Oliver Nielsen says
When using W3 Total Cache caching, the Grid’s all-SSD, network-based (clustered) setup would certainly let it serve lots of concurrebt visitors. Agree?
The Grid even does that without any (user-controlled) caching at all. Just not as fast – hence the need for caching:)
philby says
Agreed – if and when the performance is hobbled by disk speed/throughput. However, I think in most cases it’s rather a question of RAM usage: for MySQL (uncached queries) and for Apache (cached and uncached queries). Note: that’s just conjecture on my part.
Oliver Nielsen says
Conjecture maybe. But welcome conjecture. And I agree. RAM is important to MySQL (no matter if it’s MyISAM or InnoDB by the way).
I once had this site and some client sites on Media Temple’s grid + an SQL Container. Tuning it with the MySQL Tuner script, the need for more RAM was ALWAYS evident when looking at the query cache stats.
The Grid in itself has 64MB RAM allotted for MySQL by the way. Their SQL Containers are 128 – 512MB. Really pricey, from 20 – $150 respectively. But interesting in that they give an isolated VPS-like insight into how your SQL database behaves and overall health.
Thought I’d share the above “for the record” 😀
Oliver
Oliver Nielsen says
A quick correction: I said (wrote) that W3 Total Cache makes the Grid load as fast as Premium WordPress – but not WP Engine, who is still faster.
I absolutely catch your drift. Lots of money are being made in the world, by sticking a “Tailor-made for….” sticker on the box. Also effective marketing in the world of WordPress hosting.
Ideally: caching shouldn’t ever be needed, under normal circumstances. I remember Matt Mullenweg once stating that regular WordPress blogs/sites doesn’t need caching.
But WordPress is a somewhat heavy piece of code. And as you write; today WordPress is used for so much more than just “hello here’s my blog ’bout the rabbits in my backyard”. And dynamic content is indeed a big part of those uses.
To me, (disk/page/static) caching has always been considered a band-aid. Unless a site is REALLY huge (like techcrunch.com, lifehacker.com etc): caching shouldn’t be an everyday requirement.
It’s the fault of WordPress itself. It’s simply not very effective, from a coding stand-point. Some of the most skilled programmers I’ve met have rolled their eyes when I’ve asked them for their take on WordPress’ coding standards. Legacy-code everwhere.
Caching = lipstick on the big fat pig that is WordPress.
😀
Mitch Rogers says
What a great review. One of the best I’ve come across and good going on including some new hostings as well rather than just wp-engine pagely etc.
I have personally only used WP-Engine and though they were fast but there plans are really expensive and seeing the quality of there support I really didn’t find it value for money. I switched to WPOven now, which is a relatively new hosting but equally fast and much better priced plans.
Oliver Nielsen says
Thanks Mitch. Glad you appreciate it!
Hadn’t come across WPOven before. Seems very reasonably priced, considering the “unlimited sites” usage allowance (as long as one stays within the hits allotted to ones selected plan).
I see they have a custom admin interface, right? How do you like it?
Oliver
Mitch Rogers says
I find there interface user friendly. I was able to navigate thorough it pretty easily.
I find there staging site easy to setup and helpful as well.
The only thing not so great I would say about it is the fact that there support some times takes about a couple of hours to reply, but mostly they reply within 10-20 mins of posting.
But so far I haven’t quite found the need to post many tickets as the site is running smoothly.
Cheers
Oliver Nielsen says
That sounds like solid support to me!
Matt says
Problem here also is you are forgetting to mention the laughable 150 dollar charge to migrate a small wordpress site to MT managed wp. The other competitors do free migrations. That totally changes things.
Oliver Nielsen says
They have a free migration tool that, according to what I’ve heard, works great. I wouldn’t know though: I prefer to do it myself. Pretty easy.
Philby says
Great post – especially the “create 200 posts to measure sheer server speed” bit.
After having tested some key managed WP services (mediatemple, godaddy, wpengine, synthesis, siteground, I was just about to come back to (mt), allured by the fair pricing and it not being metered in any way.
Having read your article, I think I’ll wait some more, at least until (mt) and GoDaddy — as far as I can tell, they’re both exactly the same setup, same caching, same servers — set up WP shop here in Europe, later this year.
Or I may go with what in my experience so far is the fastest WP hosting anywhere — faster than any NGiNX/Varnish/whatnot setup I tried on Digital Ocean: kinsta.com. Working in the WP backend almost feels like being in a desktop app, or a local server. Amazing. If Mark can keep the speed up there when all the managed WP goodies like backup, GIT, staging and so on are operational, we’ll have a winner.
Kent says
When running your test on the media temple grid service, were you utilizing its CloudFlare integration? Specifically, were you using CloudFlare Railgun, which is included with the grid service as a free option?
Oliver Nielsen says
Hi Kent
Nope. Decided to leave CloudFlare out of the equation. I do have extensive experience with CloudFlare (incl. Railgun) on the Grid, and will be happy to share.
I’ve never experienced any radical speed gains from using Railgun. To the contrary, it has given me lots of headaches, due to media files failing to upload (http error) when uploading them through WordPress. Despite /wp-admin/ being filtered from Railgun influence via CloudFlare’s site settings dashboard. I spent so much time documenting that bug for both Media Temple and CloudFlare. In the end, it’s gotten almost solved. It’s still not working reliably. So I can’t say I’m a fan of Railgun.
I do like CloudFlare’s RocketLoader though! It drastically speeds up sites using JavaScript (aka most sites).
Do ask more if you still have questions. I’ll be happy to answer if I can.
=)
Oliver
But what about dynamic content? says
I have to say, the last bit about W3 Total Cache confused me: Are you saying that all of this is moot? That if you just throw W3 Total Cache onto gs then you’ve got a service just as fast as the best managed host?
If that’s true, then this whole discussion would seem to be a no-brainer as you can pretty much host as many WP installations as you like on MT grid service.
But more importantly — there’s another issue which needs to be addressed here and it’s dynamic content.
WordPress has long since left the world of pure CMS, and now runs a whole gambit of dynamic sites from real estate listings, to help-desk sites, to 1000’s of different kinds of store-fronts and commerce sites.
This is ultimately where the advantage of pure “caching” and CDN’s swiftly disappears and the issue becomes one of “how successfully does WordPress hosting scale on the CPU side of things to elastically accommodate spikes in traffic.
It would be very interesting to see how a common WP commerce site like WooCommerce performs on the above hosting options.
It would also be interesting to see how something like Amazon EC2 compares with managed hosting options.
Oliver Nielsen says
Great comment – good thinking and considerations. When it comes to Media Temple’s Grid, page/disk caching speeds it up tremendously. The Grid’s biggest bottleneck has always been database latency, as a result of its architecture. But caching only speeds up the frontend. Backend / wp-admin can’t be cached. Plus, the Grid has fewer resources dedicated to it. Ecommerce plugins like Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce run better on Premium WordPress (to stay in Media Temple territory) and of course WPEngine, Flywheel and Synthesis.
There’s no doubt WordPress could be much leaner and faster. It has tons of legacy code, and as you say: WordPress was built for something else (blogs) than the plethora of tasks it’s built for today.
When dealing with complex WordPress sites, I can’t help thinking “this site would be insanely faster, less buggy and more enjoyable to use / administer, had it been built on a proper framework like Ruby on Rails – or built using a more CMS-geared system like Drew’s Perch, Expression Engine, concrete5, or similar”.
Case in point: the sites I built in 2009/2010 (before I started using theme frameworks like Thesis, Genesis and later Headway) on WordPress themes I coded from scratch: they have NEVER given me any trouble during the years since their creation. Not a single upgrade/compatibility issue ever encountered.
And those sites fly, speed-wise.
Same can NOT be said when dealing with sites built on theme frameworks.
My point being: the above’s just an example of how merely the THEME being built from scratch, can drastically ensure speed + stability/longevity.
Imagine a site where everything is built from scratch. Wham!
Not plausible for small, simple sites. But for app-like sites, membership-sites and such: definitely worth considering coding it from scratch. Provided the resources are present.
Cesar Falcao says
Hi there. I’d like to make some notes in your conversation:
I agree that MT shared with W3TC is as good as the managed plan. You can see by the article that proper attention to the setup was not the primary concern there (what shows more clearly when talking with the managed “support”). Sorry guys, but MT made a rush setup, as fast and low pricey for them (I can bet that just swap Apache for NginX and gave a little more memory and Mhz available).
They don’t play in the same level that WPEngine and such play. (Sorry MT, if I’m mistaking, I can hear your history in a conversation).
Now every “shared” plan in every hosting is as fast and good as you just have 1 to 3 simultaneous users. That’s the real challenge: keep the same performance with, let’s say, 1.000 concurrents users. Different sites and budgets too.
Other static frameworks are faster than WP, any static content is fast with no knowledge necessary! WP dynamic content can get as fast, those really pro people and tools are out there to do it (WPengine and such).
So if you want a static framework you can get instant speed, but you need to trade it for all the WP plugins, knowledge and community. Good luck with that.
Goddady (and MT) are like Walmart: cheap and for the masses. Don’t even think about expecting a good NginX, Varnish or HVVM from them.
Cheers.
Oliver Nielsen says
Hey Cesar
To an extent I agree. But when it comes to scalability, Premium WordPress would probably win. It’s a clustered architecture, so there are many servers to do the heavy lifting.
And Cesar… Media Temple ARE using Varnish on their Premium WordPress servers. Read more here:
https://www.webmatros.com/media-temple-premium-wordpress-hosting-review-2014/
=)
Oliver
Cesar Falcao says
Hi man, sorry about the harsh temper about MT. After some experiences with some cheap, “unlimited bandwidth” hosting, I just freak out just thinking about them…
Yes, they use Varnish and some other tech, as your very well written article said. I just said that because of the benchmark data you posted here: its so slow, maybes its just spoor set up.
Well, we know they use varnish, why it’s so slow?
My new take: 1 – still using Apache, 2- Varnish needs Ram to cache, so no enough memory in the VPS and 3- Not enough processing power, because their cluster (my guess) is not set up for performance, just put many users as possible and some kind of redundancy.
A cluster will scale if you have access to more VM, whats happen in WPEngine in a spike of traffic. MT will hang or shut you off just like shared. It’s better than shared, but by no means a “managed” top service.
Just take a look to Rackspace managed: it’s starts a 100/m! Compared to it 29/m is very fair. Cheers.
philby says
Actually, the perceived slowness of (mt) and GoDaddy managed WordPress (they share the same Apache/Batcache/Varnish setup, AFAIK) is in the backend. The frontend is rather nicely optimized for speed, and it holds up pretty well to a traffic spike, I think.
Here’s a 1000 VUs / 1 minute test of GoDaddy, using a Genesis Theme and theme unit test data:
This rush generated 10,920 successful hits in 60 seconds and we transferred 1.16 GB of data in and out of your app. The average hit rate of 198/second translates to about 17,143,200 hits/day.
The average response time was 414 ms.
When I tested WPEngine in March, their server actually didn’t perform quite as nicely.
Cesar Falcao says
Thanks philby for sharing your experience.
Oliver Nielsen says
Thanks for backing up my assumptions with data regarding ability to handle traffic spikes. You rock!
PS: I’m thinking more and more that Media Temple’s Premium WordPress is a rebranded GoDaddy Managed WordPress. The DNS zone records point to GoDaddy’s IP adresses, and both have a single “Flush Cache” button etc.
In all fairness, Premium WordPress may be a newer iteration, improved upon by Media Temple’s engineers. And, the admin area is of course also custom.
All in all, now that the product has matured since launch: I’m pretty happy with Media Temple’s Premium WordPress. I do miss the Grid’s flexibility though. “Miss” is prolly the wrong word here, as I still also have my Grid account. Some may miss it in WP Premium if they want the kind of flexibility the Grid offers…
philby says
I’m almost 100% certain it’s one and the same, since they both use exactly the same caching plugin called “gd-system-plugin.php” and all the same servers addresses for sftp, staging, temporary domains and so on.
Where (mt) is far more advanced is in the control panel, but then GD have been promising the same features for a looong time now.
Oliver Nielsen says
Hmmm… Interesting facts!
I must say: when they got acquired by GoDaddy, I was like “well, strange, not expected… but whatever…” Whereas today, I’m leaning more and more towards most people’s initial reaction: “What da fuck??! GoDaddy? That’s the end of (mt) as we know it…”
As in:
Why oh why all these mergers. Bigger isn’t always better. At all.
Oliver Nielsen says
Hey Cesar
Your temper isn’t harsh – you’re just passionately South / Latin American I guess ;-p And that’s always welcome:)
But… WP Engine = VPS setup. Media Temple Premium = clustered setup. I do think the latter will scale better, if my site suddenly hits the news and I get my 15 minutes of online fame 😀
Media Temple’s Premium WordPress isn’t slow by any means. It’s just that WP Engine’s architecture and special cache is über-fast;)
Cesar Falcao says
:). I forget to mention CDN, it helps a lot.
cesarfalcao says
Great great article! The idea to benchmark the batch creating of posts is really clever, it’s a great way to see how the whole set of server apps (WP, DB, disk etc) are running together!
Today I really have only two choices for performance WordPress hosting: WPEngine or Digital Ocean (self managed). Another hosting worth mentioning is A Small Orange, that uses SSD disk in their shared plans (can double the performance of another shared plans).
WPEngine is a little expensive, but it’s worth the price. The CSS problems were cache, for sure, just need to ask the support to clear it. That’s exactly the advantage of DO: you don’t need to ask support – and wait – you just go and clear it yourself.
All the other contestants are really a shame compared to it – Synthesis for 97/m is just a plain bad joke. The worst one was “premium” MT – just a shared with W3TC installed, basically. What a shame.
The foundation for performance in WordPress is just it: Nginx. Caching without it is just gimmicks, it won’t scale. Put some pressure in a shared host, and say goodbye to your site.
Justin says
Hi Cesar,
Regarding DigitalOcean servers being unmanaged, you might want to check out ServerPilot for turning DigitalOcean servers into managed servers for WordPress hosting. It uses Nginx in front of Apache so you can still use .htaccess files.
https://serverpilot.io/wordpress-hosting
Cheers,
Justin
Cesar Falcao says
Thanks Justin. ServerPilot is a great tool. Having a one click install for WordPress with NginX and server security updates in the free plan is something very welcome.
Personally I prefer to use just NginX, as Apache will eat 2-3 x more memory for the same task, but it’s easier to setup and is more compatible.
Right now I’m switching from Ubuntu to FreeBSD. There’s a article in the NginX blog that explain a feature available in Unix (Thread Pools) can make it run up to 900% faster. The article teach a workaround in Linuxes distros, as the feature is not implymented. (https://www.nginx.com/blog/thread-pools-boost-performance-9x/)
Cesar Falcao says
One thing that makes me curious now is about caching in WP: the 2015 scene is quite a bit different as I read some articles and W3TC was not the faster solution.
In the articles the first 3 best performers were: ZenCache (free and paid), WP Rocket (paid) and Super Cache (free). W3TC got 4th in all the reviews.
My doubt is if the review were paid reviews, so the numbers are not real. Since I work and college (again) I don’t have time to test ’em myself. I’d love to see a trusty source for review them.
Justin says
DigitalOcean is by far better than WPEngine in my experience, but I couldn’t manage it. And I read that Apache can slow down Nginx. The only company I found that managed DO servers is LittleBizzy, but haven’t tried ’em yet.
https://www.littlebizzy.com/hosting
But there are probably others out there already. I don’t need to change much after DO is setup but when you have an emergency its nice to have help. And I can’t stand that WPEngine blocks so many plugins. They really are overrated when it comes to loading speed. I think SiteGround is a little better, but nothing compares to getting your own IP address on DigitalOcean.
Oliver Nielsen says
Hey Justin – thanks for adding your voice here.
You’re right, in the sense that a bare bones (even virtual / cloud) server that you yourself setup, is potentially faster (it’s not a given though) for the price / at a lower price.
It has to be managed though, and that ain’t easy. And to perform at its best, it WILL need regular maintenance and optimization. It’s not just a question of adding more nodes when your traffic changes/increases – buffer limits (database included) needs human attention too. Else the initial performance gains will decrease, over time.
So unless one knows (or *wants* to know! Anything and everything is learnable) how to manage a server (not just the set up); it’d likely be a safer, overall better choice: to choose managed hosting, like f.e. WP Engine. Even at an extra cost, that really is peanuts, considered the decrease in server-admin work one has to do, on an ongoing basis.
For what reasons does nothing compare to getting your own IP address on Digital Ocean? Curious… SEO reasons?
=)
Oliver
Justin says
Hi Oliver, thanks for your reply. Yes its exactly what you said I am learning, that the server requires a lot of maintenance for security reasons and software upgrades, and during traffic growth. Like MySQL optimization or Nginx settings. I have found that MySQL is especially difficult to manage during growth.
But about the IP address, maybe I said it wrong. I just mean that getting your own VPS on DigitalOcean is the best performance I’ve seen in dozens of web hosts. And the price doesn’t even really matter because DO is still faster even at $5 seems. That is because its a virtual setting and the other sites can’t effect your website as its a dedicated IP address. But if you host on WPEngine or other hosts, the virtualization is sometimes not the same as it seems bulky with security scripts or whatever. DO is a raw, totally virgin VPS with nothing slowing it down in a perfect datacenter. Some people think a dedicated IP helps SEO, but anyway I use CloudFlare so it doesn’t matter anyway. But definitely the speed of DO is amazing with CloudFlare on top. But just considering some different server management companies now, as going into the Amazon world is NOT something I want =P