WordPress web hosting: The big performance test

WordPress Webhoster in comparison test – Completely without advertising, ulterior motives and affiliate links

I have spent the last few days a lot of effort to test the different popular offers on the market. For this I mainly used the plugin WPPerformanceTester, because here not only the PHP computation time is measured, but also how many WordPress-like queries per second the database server can deliver. PHP 7.4 was used for all tests.

Web hosting from Infomaniak, Hetzner (Level 9), Raidboxes (Starter) and All-Inkl (Premium) was tested. In addition, I took a closer look at Hetzner’s managed vServer MC40, which ultimately falls somewhere between web hosting and VPS. In addition, the Hetzner cloud servers CX31 and CX41, Contabo VPS S (in Singapore) and L (in Germany) were tested. To supplement this, a VirtualBox VM with 8 vCPUs was also tested on a Hetzner Rootserver (AX51) host system. For the Contabo VPS L, a comparison test between Debian with Plesk and Ubuntu with CyberPanel plus LiteSpeed Webserver was also performed.

During my tests, I was surprised by Hetzner in three ways, firstly by the relatively good performance of the web hosting package and secondly by the poor performance of the cloud servers and the subterranean performance of the managed V-Server MC40. During the night, Hetzner web hosting was able to roughly double its performance in terms of SQL queries per second.

The VM instance on its own bare metal server at Hetzner achieved very good values, as expected.

However, All-inkl was able to surprise positively and achieved peak values in terms of SQL server queries per second. The peak value was even far above the VM instance on the bare metal server at Hetzner. This suggests that All-Inkl does use pretty decent host systems for web hosting here. For good measure, I also ran a pagespeed test, which also scored 100/100.

Infomaniak disappointed me a bit, because I actually remembered the performance here being better, but in the end the performance is even far below Hetzner web hosting. Even repeated inquiries to the support did not bring any remedy, rather the hoster tried to push the alleged error “on me” – a very questionable approach.

I would also have expected a better result from Raidboxes based on the advertising. However, not much more was to be expected from the specifications presented.

In direct comparison to Hetzner, Contabo’s vServers also scored well at both tested locations (Germany and Singapore). I can only guess the reason for this, which is why I also measured the disk performance of the Cloud Server CX31 and the disk performance of the Cotabo VPS L. While the write speed here is about the same for both providers, there are significant differences in the read speed. This and presumably other limitations in the use of the CPU, will probably have led to the very high difference in SQL queries per second here.

Conclusion: Contabo was able to score with its vServer offers and shares 1st place with the web hosting offer from All-Inkl in my opinion. The managed vServer MC40 from Hetzner, on the other hand, is the absolute taillight.

The disadvantage of All-Inkl is the lack of mod_pagespeed – unfortunately, support was also unable to offer a paid installation here with the web hosting plans.

Note: All tests are based on the performance of WordPress. All other features like backups, security, stability, network connection etc. are not considered here. If the features and stability are also in the foreground, I advise from experience to choose a server or web hosting package from Hetzner.

In the table below you can find the comparative values for the web hosting tariffs:

Correction: Infomaniak’s scores have improved slightly after upgrading to MariaDB 10<.>

The following table shows the comparative values for the vServers:

Additionally the Contabo VPS L was tested with Plesk and with CyberPanel plus LiteSpeed web server:

Correction: The Contabo VPSL dropped to 696 queries persecond.

Since the performance between Hetzner and Contabo was so great, the disk was also tested:

Since I was very surprised at the end about the good result of All-Inkl and also surprised about the poor database server performance of Infomaniak, I switched to PHP 8 and tested Contabo VPS L, All-Inkl and Infomaniak again with another tool. As with my other series of tests, the bottleneck is clearly the database server. You can find the results as screenshots here:

I have also captured the individual test results of the large test series for you as a screenshot: