
Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared - bwb
http://www.wpsitecare.com/performance-of-7-top-wordpress-hosting-companies-compared/
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jacques_chester
More useful than minima and maxima by themselves would be an mean and standard
deviation.

It's more useful to know how the sites perform _most of the time_.

I'd also have been interested to know if tests were controlled for time of
day. For example, the sites I host are almost all Australian and so the
traffic I see follows a 12-hour wave as daylight crosses the continent from
East to West, with small peaks around lunch time and after dinner.

~~~
ryandonsullivan
Yep. These are all great points. This is the first set of many many tests to
come but it was good to get a baseline. If you check the timestamps of the
full tests, you'll see that all of them were run back to back to back within
the course of about 2 hours total time, so there shouldn't be much variation.
That said, locking down ALL of the potential variables is definitely something
I'm striving for long term.

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bdclimber14
Hi Ryan, my name is Sean. I'm the GoDaddy product manager in charge of
WordPress hosting. Thanks for including us and I'm glad we could surprise you
with some fast speeds. In the past few months we've really made some huge
strides in reducing page load times and are at some impressive speeds across
the board right now. However, seeing your response times fall off a cliff
surprised us too. There's been a big email thread going on this weekend to
nail down exactly what happened so we can fix it :) I'd love to talk more and
share some of the details around a new WordPress experience we're delivering
in a few months. My email is in my HN profile.

~~~
jacques_chester
Check what kind of traffic you are seeing on /xmlrpc.php.

What tends to happen is that spammers hit that file up and ask it to perform
slow operations (the Wordpress team recently greatly expanded its
capabilities). A PHP instance gets tied up for the duration. I've had
instances lock up until killed by timeouts of 2 minutes.

When a bunch of traffic arrives at once, it only takes a handful of badly
behaved instances of xmlrpc.php to render the server essentially inoperable.

I just went through this a few months ago. My bloggers don't use it and it
can't be deactivated from within Wordpress any more, so I just 404 it in
nginx.

~~~
bdclimber14
Thanks for the tip. After reviewing Ryan's logs, it turns out a software
security layer, Sentinel, was detecting the load test as a DoS attack since
LoadImpact was sending all traffic from a single IP.

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hiccup
I'd have preferred all the hosting times use the same scale on the left hand
side to more easily relate response times. It would also have been cool to see
all of the graphs stacked on top of each other in one graph or visually
grouped the separate graphs together in a single page's height.

I guess as a marketing piece it gets some interest, but it lacked in actual
utility for me.

~~~
ryandonsullivan
That's definitely fair feedback. One thing to keep in mind is, that with an
outlier of 4 minutes and change, the graph would have to be blown up to a
massive scale in order to see any variation in response times from the other
hosts. Otherwise the other 6 hosts barely would have come up off the x-axis.
The good news is that we have the data to produce exactly what you're talking
about, but in terms of practicality for this article it was a little tough to
justify. That said, I hear you and putting that together will be a fun new
challenge.

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tibbon
I really don't understand Wordpress as a blog platform sometimes. Why so many
database queries? Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps
comments? Static pages make significantly more sense for almost all blog
setups (Octopress ftw). Making a blog handle this amount of traffic should be
trivial, but Wordpress itself is often an issue.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments?_

Comments are non-negotiable features for many bloggers. 3rd party javascript
is not the same in the eyes of many (including my little network).

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xaritas
Unless things have changed dramatically recently, Hacker News uses the file
system to store comments
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522))
and it seems to work well. I can imagine a few cases where having your
comments in a DBMS would be a requirement, but none of them seem applicable to
situations where WordPress where one might want to use WordPress anyway.

Of course, this is guess from a priori reasoning. I would be genuinely
interested if somebody tried file-based comments for a WordPress (or a similar
platform) based site and it fell over or failed in some way.

~~~
jacques_chester
Reasonable point, insofar as it's unlike that comments will ever be joined
with unrelated articles.

The main reason you'd get failures in a flat file system would be the normal
reasons you get a relational database in the first place. Either you get
update anomalies, or you want to compact the data into single atoms, or you
want ad hoc querying rather than a specific pattern of access set in advance.

It doesn't help that until 5.6 MySQL's query planner joined on disk if you
tried to join any two tables in which one or both has a TEXT field, regardless
of engine and regardless of the actual fields selected.

As you can imagine, this slows things down a bit, considering that's the core
join performed for single post generation. It also makes every kind of "recent
comments" plugin a performance nightmare (quite aside from their cache-busting
power).

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Zaheer
I personally use Rapidpress. For less than $3 a month (the cheapest I've
found) I get great service and great speed/uptime. No quantitative numbers to
back it up but its great so far.

[https://www.name.com/rapidpress](https://www.name.com/rapidpress)

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zoba
I use A Small Orange for VPS, so I can't comment specifically on hosting
Wordpress, however, their support is great. Their chat support is very
responsive and helped me get nginx configured properly (I wasn't expecting
them to go to such lengths to help me!).

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chiaro
What is the prevailing opinion on dedicated wordpress hosting providers such
as zippykid?

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uladzislau
No uptime mentioned? The common issue with shared hosting providers is
frequent downtime.

~~~
ryandonsullivan
For this particular article I didn't record any uptime. It's definitely a
metric worth measuring, but I wanted to get super specific with this test.
Lots more testing to come :)

