Following our recent announcement of the WordPress as a Service offering, we benchmarked the Free WordPress as a Service plan and now publish the results.
WordPress as a Service – Introduction
WordPress as a Service plans offer the variety of server resource allocation, such as CPU, RAM, cloud web space. The introduced four plans are:
- Free WordPress
- Silver WordPress
- Gold WordPress
- Platinum WordPress
Every account runs a single WordPress website in a container isolated environment, which implies the server resource cap. For example, the Free WordPress comes with 1ECU and 512MB or RAM. The top-range Platinum WordPress comes with 20ECU and 4GB of RAM. We also provide custom container sizes upon request, when required.
What is an ECU
The ECU stands for Elastic Compute Unit, which translates into CPU time and equals to 10% of CPU time.
The most frequent question we hear is: is 1 ECU enough to run my blog (or Wordpres online shop)?
Some well known hosting companies offer 25% CPU limit and 512MB of RAM for Unlimited sites hosting plans. Our allocation of 1 ECU (10% CPU time) and 512MB or RAM is well enough to run a single busy blog, a company website, a satellite website or a small eCommerce website.
WordPress benchmarking test description
We benchmarked our Free WordPress as a Service account (we used a test website https://wp8.readyhost.net.au) using the loader.io and the blazemeter.com. This is to cross-test and provide enough confidence that even the Free WordPress account will give you enough power for what the most websites need.
In our tests, we used a fresh installation of WordPress 4.7.4 with 20 dummy posts. All posts contain some amount of text and one or more images of various sizes. You may check it yourself by going to https://wp8.readyhost.net.au, as we left the content as is.
The WordPress theme used: Twenty Seventeen,
Plugins used
- Nginx Helpers
- W3TotalCache
Note! All URLs were accessed over HTTPS with a free SSL certificate (it comes free with every WordPress account). All WordPress as a Service websites provide support for HTTP/2, brotli compression and mod_pagespeed front-end optimisation.
WordPress as a Service – Benchmarking tools
WordPress benchmarking by Loader.io
We tried multiple test variations when benchmarking the limits of the free WordPress website. The Free WordPress was capable of reliably serving 5 visitors per second or 300 visitors per minute. This is the equivalent of about 50 – 100 real users browsing your website simultaneously.
You can access test results here: http://bit.ly/2r8E1g1
Benchmarking results for the Free WordPress as a Service package outlines capability to handle small traffic spikes
WordPress benchmarking by Blazemeter.com
We cross-checked our benchmarks for the free WordPress as a Service plan, to confirm the consistency across multiple benchmarking platforms.
The result of benchmarking by blazemeter.com could be browsed from their report page
The Blazemeter test was running by accessing the home page and 19 other pages. The test run for 20 minutes with 50 simultaneous users. The hit rate was averaging 8.49 page views per second.
Benchmarking of free WordPress as a Service by Blazemeter to outline capabilities of free WordPress – service 50 concurrent users for 20 minutes test
Top command shows the moment where 50 concurrent users are browsing a Free WordPress as a Service website with dummy content
We used blazemeter.com to test the Free WordPress with W3TotalCache plugin and without it. Check out this screenshot:
Blazemeter benchmarks outline that W3TotalCache vs Uncached WordPress is capable of delivering 47% more requests
Free WordPress as a Service – Conclusion
The Free WordPress as a Service plan is very capable of handling small traffic, including spikes, which should be more than sufficient for the majority of personal websites. In our blazemeter tests, the 50 users constantly browsing the site by hitting 20 different URLs during 20 minutes outline that the free account is capable of serving a much higher traffic.