MWP Cloud vs The Competition

Behind the data

To make the testing as fair as possible, we compared the base level plans of each hosting provider. We also used the same basic test website and added it to each hosting plan. This data is provided by our infrastructure partner… but here’s exactly how they carried out testing:

Testing how many parallel users each hosting server could handle.

For the load test we used “https://loader.io/” a free load testing service that allows you to stress test your web-apps and APIs with thousands of concurrent connections.

Setting the client load test boundaries.

When running each load test, we set a max limit of 5000 clients. We found this to be an appropriate limit – as most hosts didn’t end up reaching 1000 clients anyway.

All of the tests ran for 5 minutes and the error failure was set to 1% as soon as errors started to appear. These errors include timeouts, 400/500, and network errors (all accumulating to 1%).

We chose 1% as the lowest possible value so the test would stop immediately and give the most accurate reading of max parallel clients.

Next, we put the speed of each host to the test.

To test speed we used KeyCDN’s performance testing tool.

In a nutshell, the tool tests and measures the performance of any URL from 10 different locations from around the world.

There isn’t a lot to the test itself, simply paste in the URL you want to test and hit the button. Remember it’s also free, so you can use it for your own testing.

The big problem with comparing TTFB results…

The only problem is, TTFB (or the speed of a host in general) isn’t so straightforward to compare. This is because the speed will vary depending on the location of the hosts server in relation to the user.

For example, if the server you chose for your hosted site was located in The Netherlands, the TTFB reading from Amsterdam is always going to be better.

So in order to be fair to all the hosts involved, we chose to present the TTFB readings in two different ways:

1. ”Average TTFB” (Geo optimized) – This was the lowest (A.K.A best) TTFB reading out of all the locations tested.
2. ”Average TTFB” (Across all locations) – The average TTFB time across all the tested locations.

Levelling the playing field even further.

Another important aspect about our testing is the fact all tests were run WITHOUT taking caching into consideration.

Basically this means we tested the hosting servers themselves, not factoring in any caching or CDN implementations each host may have. This was done by forcing WP to be logged-in so everything is by-passed.

Want to go deeper?

Click here to view the full write-up on the testing methodology and results analysis. If you have any questions or want to see how your site loads on MWP Cloud, drop us a line and we’ll set up a personalized comparison.