EDIT: nope. That's was supposed to be a table of the webpagetest.org results :/ its 3am here and I need to get some sleep and be awake again in a few hours. I will have to get back to you on a nicer formatted version.
Thanks. That's actually more than enough to help me understand and compare. For completeness you may want to mention in your original review that you used a default wordpress install for the tests which is ~250-500kB downloaded and listed as "Bytes In" in a webpagetest.org result. Maybe you did and I missed it.
I started my tests with a default install too, but found that the actual sites I deal with are in the 1-2MB range so I imported "dummy content" I found somewhere to get more representative data and test different stacks of my own creation.
I decided to go with a $40/mo un-managed VPS 6 months ago partly because managed would have been hundreds of dollars more per month and partly because I wanted to learn how to do it myself. After approx 6mo of testing and optimizing various stacks with similar results to these managed hosts I have to say they represent a tremendous value. Configuration management, back ups, maintenance, security and disaster recovery of a high performance stack is a lot of work and I am not sure if I want to keep doing it.
That said, I could probably start my own managed hosting company that would compete well at this point!
I mentioned it was the default install but maybe that wasn't clear enough. I changed them all to 2014 theme too to give some parity. Real sites get heavier and heavier. When I load tests later they were on more realistic sites with some popular plugins enabled and dummy content. It's hard to make a 'representative' site though. Each install I've worked with has it's own set of plugins and feature-creep, it's hard to benchmark something like that and say it scales across everything.
It definitely is a lot of work managing your own sites and these managed providers certainly fit a niche. You wouldn't be the first to jump in and start offering it yourself. Pressable has a bunch of code shared on GitHub if you were serious about it too.
If you ever are interested in writing about your experience optimizing WP, I was thinking of doing an article like that as well. Maybe you could do a guest post? kevin at reviewsignal is my email if you're interested.
Comments
Let's see if this works.
WebPageTest.org – Dulles,VA Result URL WebPageTest.org – Miami, FL Result URL WebPageTest.org – Denver, CO Result URL WebPageTest.org –Los Angeles, CA Result URL 1.894s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_6C_J3P/ 2.035s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_DQ_HF4/ 2.381s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_66_H6X/ 1.648s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_JY_GRT/ 0.850s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140304_FV_6XQ/ 0.961s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140304_RG_6Z9/ 1.056s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140304_MH_6ZH/ 0.665s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140304_RN_70Y/ 1.245s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_XW_J0Q/ 0.950s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_KG_HW9/ 1.419s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_N8_J39/ 0.924s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_Z1_J7G/ 0.940s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_QR_JT7/ 1.208s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_XH_JJ0/ 1.229s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_ER_JE6/ 0.671s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_DW_JB9/ 0.642s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_0K_JYE/ 1.174s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_CB_K2X/ 1.721s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_1Q_K61/ 0.981s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_A8_KNH/ 1.073s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_NR_M5G/ 1.327s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_RM_M1H/ 1.682s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_5P_KVQ/ 1.353s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_ED_KPJ/ 0.732s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_C4_M93/ 0.725s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_1W_MGX/ 1.216s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_9Q_MKK/
0.812s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_X5_NH5/ 1.235s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_RX_NJ1/ 1.060s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_ND_NP4/ 1.080s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140217_C1_NV3/ 0.924s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140218_91_HS4/ 1.083s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140218_MA_HSG/ 1.460s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140218_B3_HTE/ 0.748s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140218_VB_HW8/ 0.616s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140219_EE_RAE/ 1.021s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140219_CV_S2J/ 1.516s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140219_HH_SKQ/ 1.116s http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140219_28_SV6/
EDIT: nope. That's was supposed to be a table of the webpagetest.org results :/ its 3am here and I need to get some sleep and be awake again in a few hours. I will have to get back to you on a nicer formatted version.
Thanks. That's actually more than enough to help me understand and compare. For completeness you may want to mention in your original review that you used a default wordpress install for the tests which is ~250-500kB downloaded and listed as "Bytes In" in a webpagetest.org result. Maybe you did and I missed it.
I started my tests with a default install too, but found that the actual sites I deal with are in the 1-2MB range so I imported "dummy content" I found somewhere to get more representative data and test different stacks of my own creation.
I decided to go with a $40/mo un-managed VPS 6 months ago partly because managed would have been hundreds of dollars more per month and partly because I wanted to learn how to do it myself. After approx 6mo of testing and optimizing various stacks with similar results to these managed hosts I have to say they represent a tremendous value. Configuration management, back ups, maintenance, security and disaster recovery of a high performance stack is a lot of work and I am not sure if I want to keep doing it.
That said, I could probably start my own managed hosting company that would compete well at this point!
I mentioned it was the default install but maybe that wasn't clear enough. I changed them all to 2014 theme too to give some parity. Real sites get heavier and heavier. When I load tests later they were on more realistic sites with some popular plugins enabled and dummy content. It's hard to make a 'representative' site though. Each install I've worked with has it's own set of plugins and feature-creep, it's hard to benchmark something like that and say it scales across everything.
It definitely is a lot of work managing your own sites and these managed providers certainly fit a niche. You wouldn't be the first to jump in and start offering it yourself. Pressable has a bunch of code shared on GitHub if you were serious about it too.
If you ever are interested in writing about your experience optimizing WP, I was thinking of doing an article like that as well. Maybe you could do a guest post? kevin at reviewsignal is my email if you're interested.