20i have announced that for a second year in a row, their WordPress Hosting has been awarded ‘Top Tier’ status by Review Signal.
Review Signal’s WordPress Hosting benchmarks are carried out annually, and are unbiased, based purely on performance – not affiliate commission!
The problem with other web hosting reviews is that 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 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.
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 them, thanks to their unique autoscaling tech.
They made a total of 327,000 tests with an error rate of less than 0.015%. Their 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 20i ‘handled the test with ease’, while other hosting was subject to limits or prone to errors.
K6 testing
Unlike LoadStorm, K6 is designed to test caching, by requesting the same page again and again. It would be putting StackCache – the 20i NGINX WordPress caching plugin – through its paces.
They made 427,000 requests, with no errors at all. The 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, 20i’s 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, they 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 20i 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 they got a low score (which is good!) of 9.289. That is related to how the 20i team optimise PHP on their 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. Their SSLs received a grade of ‘A’.
Truly ‘top tier’
20i are thrilled to be awarded ‘Top Tier’ status at Review Signal! They were 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.
As the Review Signal tests are focused on performance, they don’t cover all the features of the package (like 20i’s WordPress Tools suite, for example). They also don’t take account of less tangible benefits like the quality of support: something that they’re well-known for. It’s things like that make 20i WordPress Hosting the best overall.
It’s the combination of all those things that makes 20i hosting truly ‘top tier’.
Find the results of the tests here: https://wphostingbenchmarks.com/company/20i