Godaddy shared hosting wordpress

Today I want to take a look at how many of the top WordPress hosting companies measure up from purely a performance standpoint.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that having the fastest servers doesn’t make a host the best WordPress hosting company, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. If you’re looking for the best WordPress host for your website, the data here’s a great place to start your research.

So Who REALLY Has the Best WordPress Hosting?

If you’re just looking for our opinion, the best WordPress hosting companies for shared hosting on the market today are:

Most of the hosts we evaluated performed pretty well, but those are the ones we consistently recommend to our customers and friends looking for affordable, fast WordPress hosting. If you’re interested in the data-driven reasoning behind our opinion, keep reading while I’ll break it down and explain how we ran our tests.

The Performance Testing Experiment

Testing speed and performance of servers in remote locations introduces some fun and interesting challenges. When I first set out to run these tests, I thought I’d run benchmarks for an hour or two and then be done and would be totally ready to crown the fastest performing WordPress host.

That wasn’t the case at all.

Eliminating as many variables as possible from the test ended up being a lot more work than I anticipated, but the end result is some seriously concrete data.

To run the tests I used a load testing service called Load Impact. Load Impact fires up an Amazon server that you choose, and begins to send traffic to the site, increasing slowly over a certain amount of time.

For this particular test I sent 50 users to a testing site, increasing from one user to 50 concurrent users, over the span of 10 minutes. 50 concurrent users is a nice baseline test for a shared host. Once you hit that benchmark on a fairly consistent basis, it’s probably time to start exploring VPS and Managed WordPress hosting options. Traffic increases steadily throughout the timeframe until 50 users are visiting the site all at the same time.

Here are some of the precautions I took to keep the tests as fair as possible, even though each of these sites are spread out all over the United States:

Each WordPress site is an identical install of WordPress 3.6 with the TwentyThirteen theme installed and a number of posts and pages (same number of posts and pages on every site).
I used the same domain name for every testing site with a different subdomain. I didn’t want the chance of any latency showing up in results because each testing site had a separate domain with a potentially separate registrar.
For all hosting accounts located on servers on the West Coast, I used a testing server located in Ashburn, VA. And for all hosting accounts living on servers on the East Coast, I used a testing server located in Portland, Oregon.
I did everything possible to make the physical distance traveled the same across all tests.
All caching and plugins were disabled on each site
Each test was run 5 times with the best result of each posted here.

Overall I ended up with a really nice set of data that gives some very good insight into which hosts make performance a priority, and which hosts have some work to do.

So Which Is the Best WordPress Hosting Company?

Without further ado, here’s what I found from each host. The green line represents the increase in traffic, and the blue line represents the response time of the site as traffic increases.

Inmotion Hosting’s scores really took me by surprise. With one of the fastest minimum response times, and by far the fastest max response time, InMotion stayed right around 600ms for the entire test, which is really impressive. The graph looks to have more hills and valleys than most, but that’s because it stayed so close to the median response time for the entire test. The variance from highest response time to lowest response time is roughly 388ms, which is the best in the group.

Testing Server Location: Portland, OR
InMotion Hosting Server Location: Washington DC
Max Response Time: 836.78ms
Minimum Response Time: 478.42ms

SiteGround was one of our top performers, and is especially impressive considering the $3.95 price point for their StartUp hosting tier. It does have a limitation of one website at that price point, but considering the average response time was

700ms all the way to 50 concurrent users with no real hiccups, SiteGround offers a great value.

Click here to see the full report from Load Impact

A2 Hosting makes some pretty bold claims on their website, claiming 300% faster load times with WordPress. So do the results match the claim? A2 did pretty well overall, but definitely not 300% faster than the competition. Many of the hosts listed here which don’t even make claims to be WordPress hosts performed better. Their minimum load time of 455ms is definitely impressive, and it was only slightly higher than that when the test ended. Overall they had a strong showing.

Testing Server Location: Ashburn, VA
A2 Server Location: Ann Arbor, MI
Max Response Time: 1.12 seconds
Minimum Response Time: 455.17ms

Bluehost’s performance was lackluster. As traffic increased so did response time, almost following the same steep climb. Even at lower user counts the response time jumped around quite a bit, ranging anywhere from 1 to 3.5 seconds with only 10 active users. As Bluehost approached the 20 user mark load times skyrocketed to over 10 seconds. They did come back down, but performance was still highly inconsistent with huge variances from one second to the next.

Testing Server Location: Ashburn, VA
Bluehost Server Location: Provo, UT
Max Response Time: 10.64 seconds
Minimum Response Time: 915.53 milliseconds

Eleven2 is likely the smallest hosting company that we tested on this list, although I don’t have the date to confirm that. That said, performance-wise they do pretty well as a shared hosting provider. With site load times of just under a second throughout the entire test, Eleven2 isn’t a leader, but they’re definitely no slouch. The $8 per month price is only available when you pre-pay for a year.

As noted above, because of a DNS propagation issue we actually made a mistake with one of our tests so we ran Site5 through the gamut again, and again they did very well. While their minimum response time was higher than initially reported, their max response time was lower than we initially reported. Throughout the majority of the ten minute load testing, Site5’s server response time stayed steady at 750ms to 1 second with only a handful of deviations.

Testing Server Location: Portland, OR
Site5 Server Location: Atlanta, GA
Max Response Time: 1.95 seconds
Minimum Response Time: 704.41 milliseconds

MediaTemple Grid Server is a bit pricier at $20 per month than the other hosts featured in this post, but technically it’s still considered a shared host which is why we included it. While not boasting the fastest load times, aside from a strange hiccup at the very beginning of the test, MediaTemple was rock solid all the way to scale. Variances were 2-300 milliseconds but load times generally stayed at almost exactly 1 second, regardless of the number of users.

Testing Server Location: Ashburn, VA
Media Temple Server Location: Los Angeles, CA
Max Response Time: 4.54 seconds
Minimum Response Time: 934.07 milliseconds

HostGator’s server performance looked a lot like a pattern you’d see from a healthy EKG, until it completely flatlined. The only problem is that for web performance, we don’t want to see a line with a a lot of ups and downs, flat lines are great unless they fall off the grid completely a la GoDaddy. While HostGator returned the fastest response time of any host, it’s a little misleading because the server had essentially quit at that point and then stopped responding completely. Basically it was one last hurrah before it called it a day.

*I was happy to see that my HostGator account was housed outside of the Provo, UT datacenter where Bluehost resides so we could get a more true host to host comparison.

Testing Server Location: Portland, OR
HostGator Server Location: Charlotte, NC
Max Response Time: 10.16 seconds
Minimum Response Time: 258.07 milliseconds

Arvixe has been in the hosting business for quite a while servicing other open source communities like Joomla and Drupal, and have just started shifting their efforts to the WordPress space in the last year or so. Their results here are respectable. They aren’t blow your mind fast, but they do seem solid all the way up to the 50 concurrent user mark. They had one small spike, but it recovered very quickly and the server finished the test in heroic fashion.

Testing Server Location: Palo Alto, CA
Arvixe Server Location: Santa Rosa, CA
Max Response Time 2.93 seconds
Minimum Response Time 1.06 seconds

While at a first Glance DreamHost’s results may seem inconsistent, you’ll notice that there are more bumps in the road because the extremes are much more controlled. So variances in a handful of milliseconds show up as jumps in the graph. Overall DreamHost was solid from beginning to end. It didn’t report the lowest lows, but it also kept things in check as traffic increased, without having massive jumps in response times. DreamHost had a strong showing.

Testing Server Location: Ashburn, VA
DreamHost Server Location: Los Angeles, CA
Max Response Time: 3.74 seconds
Minimum Response Time: 621.87 milliseconds

GreenGeeks didn’t do badly at all in the performance testing. After a big initial spike in response time, the server settled down and returned the sub one second response times that we like to see. There was a bit more variance throughout the test than we normally like to see, but nothing that would indicate any type of major issue. For the most part things were pretty solid.

Testing Sever Location: Chicago, IL
Green Geeks Server Location: Dallas, TX
Max Response Time: 4.7 seconds
Minimum Response Time: 571.33 ms

GoDaddy surprised me in more ways than one. GoDaddy started at a blazing 483 ms response time, but once traffic hit 25 users, it essentially fell off the face of the earth. The report lists times of above 4 minutes, and that may be true, but it almost looks like the server became completely unresponsive or started rejecting connections. The load test reported a number of failed attempts to connect to the server. While GoDaddy shined at lower traffic levels, it fell apart completely as traffic passed the 25 user mark.

Godaddy reached out and asked that I clarify the results of their test. This is what they had to say:”We use a software security layer called Sentinel. Because of it’s conservative settings, the software detected the load test as a DoS attack since all the LoadImpact traffic was coming from one IP, and banned it for 5 minutes.”I believe they have thresholds set at a painfully low level if they consider 25 users a DDOS attack. That means one small business sharing an article internally could take down a site.

Testing Server Location: Ashburn, VA
GoDaddy Server Location: Phoenix, AZ
Max Response Time: 4.1 minutes
Minimum Response Time: 483.08 milliseconds

So which shared WordPress hosting company performed the fastest?

Based strictly on the performance data from each webhost, there were three hosts that really stood out in the group. Each of the following hosts had an average page load time of below one second throughout the entire course of the test, all the way to 50 concurrent users. Stay tuned for the next update where we re-evaluate all of these options and add many more.

Visit Siteground

Visit Inmotion

Visit A2 Hosting

I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the data you see here. Anything that stands out to you? Anything that surprised you?

Let’s talk it out

Disclaimer: All hosting accounts are owned and paid for by us.

435 Comments

Sean West 3 weeks ago

I was very happy to find your review via a link from Torque. I have been looking at several of the hosting companies you tested and had become very interested in SiteGround. No decision on my part yet but extremely valuable information from you Thank You!

David 3 weeks ago

Hi, Great article.

I want to know how godaddy is at last rank, what are the cons of godaddy. and which is best hosting provider for lowest budget ?

A warning about Green Geeks. They would rather dump your site then help defend a DDoS attack. Google it. We had the experience recently where they claimed our site was the lone site being attacked so they kicked us off the server, except we noticed they did the other IP’s in the same range. So instead of helping fight of the attack, which any professional hosting company would they just dumped us (and many others it seems). Basically they would rather force you to go elsewhere then to deal with any issues you are having.

They also complained about our storage space even though we had “unlimited storage”.

Check other reviews, but trust me… stay far away from Green Geeks.

I cant believe you included Godaddy here. Godaddy is like the McDonalds of hostings!

Vic Hardy 1 month ago

This is a very timely article for me. I’ve been with Bluehost for 3 years, now have about 30 sites and the load times have become unacceptable, especially with sites that have a lot of images to load. The other thing that is annoying is that the response time within cpanel is glacially slow. The customers don’t see that but most every operation takes 5 to 10 seconds to get a response and nobody can figure it out or is willing to admit it’s an issue.

I will say that their customer support is pretty good, depending on the skill level of who you happen to get but it no longer makes up for clients asking about the slow load times.

We have started our own WordPress hosting service. Its just not a yet-another-web-hosting-company, we are making hosting a WordPress website so easy that any non-technical person can start a website.

No need to purchase a domain, we provide a free subdomain and a 7 days fully functional trial of our hosting service.

Try us at CMS Launcher. Thank you!

Norman Brown 2 months ago

I’ve used sever of these and generally agree with the BlueHost results. They use outstanding customer service to make up for underwhelming performance.

Site5 was a great company when this article was written. But now it’s at the bottom end of EIG’s offerings. It can take weeks to get a response on a simple support ticket and that doesn’t mean they will actually fix the issue. I had one open for over 2 months and the response was just to tell me how busy they’d been with a new dashboard. The heck with a new dashboard when sites are down or barely functioning. Their support chat is better, but I still wouldn’t recommend them to anyone anymore. I have almost 20 sites with them and will start migrating them to other hosts if things don’t improve soon..

Mustaasam Saleem 2 months ago

Thanks for such a great post.

I’m Mustaasam from Cloudways. I invite you to test our services and provide your valuable feedback on this post.
For testing purpose, I can provide you a full account for FREE.

You’ve done a great comparison. I’ve used 2 of the hosts that you’ve listed but I wasn’t quite satisfied with their services. The speed wasn’t as fast as I expected. Now I’m with ‘bgocloud’ and I can say that they’re doing pretty well – my website speed is great, because of the ssd hosting.

Shyami goyal 2 months ago

I think a2 hosting is best for me speed and performance is awesome and thanks for sharing this all hosting data

Joe 2 months ago

I’ve heard good things about SiteGround (from your top 3) and will probably try them out.

Also – you should do a comparison of performance on cloud hosting Google Cloud vs. AWS vs. Azure.

Although getting WP sites started on the cloud is a bit complicated and can be a pain to troubleshoot, they perform exceptionally well.
If interested check out this tutorial: https://www.onepagezen.com/wordpress-on-google-cloud-tutorial-2017 .

I hate the bait and switch though. $3 month! Then at checkout… must pay 50 years in advance.

Any company that doesn’t do this?

What about ehost is it good or no

Watch this video!

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