Start Your Engines - Let's Race!

By Terry Kyle
Chief Dog Lover/Co-Founder WPX.net (With Georgi Petrov, CEO)
Arguably The World’s Fastest WP Host

SiteGround Vs Cloudways Vs Flywheel Vs WP Engine Vs GoDaddy Vs Bluehost Vs HostGator Vs A2 Vs Kinsta Vs WPX

Let’s find out.

NO AFFILIATE LINKS WHATSOEVER IN THIS SPEED TEST COMPARISON + INFO ACCURATE AT TIME OF TESTING.

DISCLAIMER:

Yep, I am the co-founder and CEO of WPX Hosting, arguably the world’s fastest WordPress hosting service – see Matthew Woodward’s recent 7-way speed test results here – BUT does that mean that my upstart WP hosting company can crush the major players when it comes to handling Elegant Themes’ Divi?

And for some brief context here, I originally built WPX back in 2013 because of classic entrepreneurial frustration with ‘something’.

I was completely fed up with how broken the hosting industry was, in terms of:

[a] the games and avoidance played around the thorny topic of malware removal i.e. not clearly revealing up front that they do NOT remove malware from your site/s and may not even be attempting to detect it, or it’s an expensive upsell that skyrockets the hosting cost e.g.

Most bloggers/marketers lack the necessary skills or time to invest in gaining competency here, something best left to a hosting company’s dedicated team in my view.

If you think malware isn’t a huge problem, read here (look at Intel’s own problems with Meltdown/Specter vulnerabilities).

So if you need an upsell for malware detection/removal coverage like Sucuri’s $199.99 yearly deal, that can DOUBLE or TRIPLE your hosting cost, something to take into account when comparing hosting plans, companies and value for money.

Inexplicably, this potential expense rarely comes up in online discussions about hosting companies’ offers and how inclusion/exclusion of malware removal completely changes the value for money equation. Weird.

Much more on this below.

[b] the horrible, slow, unhelpful support experience with the major hosts back then – even today, most hosting support sends customers to a technical knowledgebase article and expects them to understand it and apply the solution themselves:

Can you imagine that situation if your car or TV needed fixing and the mechanic/technician threw a product manual at you and then expected you to fix it yourself? 

WPX does something very different and averages around 30 seconds for live chat responses.

[c] the dishonest marketing of much of the hosting industry e.g. ‘unmetered/unlimited’ everything that turns out to be VERY limited, not to mention their pricing strategies – much more on these below

[d] endless upsells for features/functions that should be included in the main service, in my view. 

At WPX there are ZERO upsells, just 3 plans with everything we do included on all plans.

Here’s the upselling machine in action today at Hostgator and it used to be a LOT worse:

and how WPX customers like Kris Rivenburgh feel about our LACK of upsells:

[e] the slow page loading performance of hosting services out there, especially under any traffic load, and, 

[f] the almost-complete lack of innovation in hosting functionality for hosting customers across the industry, despite massive innovation elsewhere on the Web.

Speed-wise, my personal view is that every page on a typical WP website should load in under 1 second from any location in the world, IF properly optimized (I wrote about it here) e.g. my 9.3 Mb personal blog homepage – hosted on WPX of course – packed with big images of all my animals and their friends here:

And WPX’s dog charity project site here at everydogmatters.eu, an 11 Mb page packed with big images loads like this on WPX:

I have written here about so-called ‘Performance Grades’ on Pingdom and GTMetrix and why they should be disregarded.

REMINDER: A poorly configured or UNoptimized site can still be very, very slow, even if it’s on the best hosting in the known universe.

Table Of Contents

In this test, I have endeavored to be as fair and transparent as humanly possible and am happy to debate any aspect of this speed shootout.

Every test URL and speed result is shared/linked and you can check each identical test site yourself in your favorite speed measuring gauge e.g. Pingdom Tools, GTmetrix, Google Page Speed Insights. 

Loadimpact.com tests are all also linked to each result at Load Impact.

Typically, these speed testing services keep results for 30 days but even if that period has lapsed when you are reading this, you can test the sites yourself at any time, on any tool.

LIKE THE NISSAN GT-R, TESTING & ACTUAL RESULTS MATTER, NOT BRAND NAMES OR HIGH PRICES.

Hopefully you will also see from actual testing below and here that a well known brand name and/or high price does not automatically guarantee a good service/product or superior speed – GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting doesn’t even currently support industry-standard free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates and GoDaddy still wants hefty money and hassle for that.

Incidentally, GoDaddy’s owner, Silver Lake Partners, is also now a major investor in WP Engine so let’s see what happens over there (my theory below) but if GoDaddy’s past acquisition of Media Temple is anything to go by, it won’t be good for WP Engine customers.

And a more expensive host like Liquid Web starts their WP plans at $99 a month and they want $7.50 a month extra for email on top of that, plus extra charges per mailbox (if you need it):

and a $24.99 monthly 5-site account at WPX averaged almost TWICE the speed of Liquid Web in Matt’s recent test (email free at WPX too):

In the same way, will the fact that Kinsta uses the Google Cloud for its hosting infrastructure guarantee a race victory here?

Even Google has had plenty of failures in its history: Google Buzz, Google Glass, Google+, Google Helpouts, Picasa, Google Moderator etc., even Google Apps has downtime.

Don’t even get me started on Google’s Ad Support…

Let’s see though how much the Google Cloud helps Kinsta here in terms of raw speed!

If an established brand name did automatically mean quality or even competence, then Volkswagen wouldn’t have copped $30 billion+ in fines for Dieselgate, Intel wouldn’t have had their massive security issues with Spectre and Meltdown, Ford wouldn’t have gotten a $10 million fine in Australia for blaming customers over shoddy Focus automatics and Microsoft’s Windows 10 wouldn’t have hundreds of security vulnerabilities.

You get the idea.

Big brands can suck, just like any other big, small or medium-sized company:

In this hosting test, I fully welcome feedback from any of the tested companies or their fans in the comments section below, especially if you feel that any aspect of this test was unfair or biased towards WPX.

Why Would I Run Such A Test?

[a] because I can, as can anyone

[b] my whole online career has been built on massive testing, rather than simply accepting what someone wrote on a blog somewhere as fact (usually just copied from another blog and/or buying into brand propaganda without any actual testing)

[c] I want to push my WPX technical team to deliver even greater page loading speed beyond what we have already achieved

With WPX, I want to build an affordable McLaren Speedtail of the hosting industry, and tests like this provide great benchmarks for WPX to beat, or beat by an even bigger margin.

[d] to compare how my WPX currently stacks up on RAW SPEED and VALUE in 2019 by comparing our service to our most obvious WP hosting competitors. 

I am confident – but not arrogant and take nothing for granted – that WPX can beat or compete with any hosting at any price, especially on speed (support too) but let’s see, shall we…

Who Is This Test Relevant For & Who Shouldn't Care?

Should you be really happy with the speed, support, security and value-for-money of your current WP host, then my best advice is to stick with them and focus on building your business.

Or if you deal with local clients e.g. plumbers, restaurants, dentists etc, with tiny websites that don’t get much traffic, then arguably cheap and nasty hosting is probably going to work for you, IF you don’t ever need much technical support from your hosting service.

HOWEVER

if you’re NOT happy with your current WP host and want to give every potential buyer or site visitor in your niche across the world a superfast experience on your site AND you are likely to get traffic spikes from email promotions, paid ads, product launches etc, then you shouldn’t be killing your conversions and optins with a slow website from most areas of the world that can’t handle much traffic.

You have already worked hard and/or spent a lot of time and money to get traffic to your website so it’s increasingly crucial to give them a good experience when they do come. e.g. again from Matt Woodward’s recent test, not my Divi test here (see further below for that):

You can also read his analysis of what a slow website could be costing you here, it’s an older article but as relevant as ever.

I am also assuming that you do NOT have Systems Admin skills or the desire to learn them and therefore you want that stuff managed for you, as much as possible, so you can get on with running your online business or blog.

And Your Methodology Here Would Be?

In this Elegant Themes’ Divi hosting speed test, I will be testing (‘managed’) WordPress hosting services at the following  companies:

  • WPX Hosting (mine)
  • SiteGround
  • Cloudways (using Digital Ocean, several other options there too)
  • Flywheel (acquired by WP Engine in June 2019)
  • WPEngine
  • GoDaddy WP Hosting
  • Bluehost ‘WP Pro’ Managed WordPress Hosting
  • Hostgator Managed WordPress Hosting
  • A2
  • Kinsta

Again, if you think a WP host was unfairly excluded from this test, let me know in the comments below.

I limited this test to 10 companies to keep it manageable but can consider adding others in future tests – SiteGround is tested here twice, with and without the recommended free Cloudflare option so that you can see for yourself the speed difference.

This whole group will be tested in a Motor Trend-style ‘World’s Greatest Drag Race’ for a clear Divi hosting winner:

and then we will see how WPX compares to each of the other players above, one by one.

Each site will be using completely identical content and site configuration (as much as possible, some hosts have their own custom caching plugins), namely:

  • Default Divi with minimal changes, just text and images added, no fancy layouts or templates
  • 7,500 words lorem ipsum text (same for each site)
  • 30 x 1,000 pixel wide JPEG images of my 3 awesome dogs (Joey, Rina and Jorro) and my 5 super cats (Sasha, Misha, Gigi, Yana and Bella) + some of their dog buddies, all images optimized at 80% quality in paint.net, same photos on all sites
  • Any unnecessary plugins removed
  • Recommended caching plugins installed and active

The domains/sites for each are listed below and I used this name generator tool for the domain names, because they had to be called something!

All test domains were purchased on Namecheap early in 2019:

If you want to just skip to those detailed individual comparisons, you can do so here:

When it comes to CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), if a hosting company above offered it, I enabled it, whether it was free (e.g. Cloudflare) or paid e.g. Flywheel charges $10 a month extra per site for a Stackpath CDN.

One quick note on the free Cloudflare CDN which is quite popular.

From our testing here, particularly with SiteGround, it can actually slow down loading times from around the world (see actual results below) and from a purely business point of view, Cloudflare isn’t motivated to make the free CDN too good as they would want users upgrading to their paid CDN, wouldn’t they?

And if it does improve loading speed, does it improve it enough compared to a paid CDN or the WPX Cloud CDN?

You can see for yourself in this test with SiteGround where williamchoy.host DOES have the free Cloudflare CDN enabled and with jenniferwoods.host on SiteGround (same account) which DOES NOT have the free Cloudflare CDN enabled – content and configuration otherwise identical and SiteGround’s ‘SG Optimizer’ plugin IS active on both.

To my knowledge, WPX Hosting is the only host with its own custom CDN that is heavily and continually optimized for our own technology stack and our ‘WPX Cloud‘ (CDN) is free on all hosting plans at WPX.

That was our major weapon in crushing the speed tests here, even against hosts charging 4-5x our prices like Liquid Web and WP Engine in Matt Woodward’s test.

Though Cloudways do offer something called ‘CloudwaysCDN’, this is a rebranded Stackpath CDN rather than their own custom CDN.

All sites will be tested on:

  • Page loading speed from all 7 GTMetrix locations: Vancouver, Dallas, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, Sydney, Sao Paulo (fastest single result from 3+ GTMetrix scans to see best caching performance and allow for network or server anomalies during test scans, test for yourself too!)
  • Page loading speed from all 7 Pingdom Tools locations: Tokyo, Frankfurt, London, Washington DC, San Francisco, Sydney, Sao Paulo (fastest single result from 3+ Pingdom scans to see best caching performance and allow for network or server anomalies during test scans, test for yourself too!)
  • LoadImpact.com with 100 simultaneous users (testing with more usually triggers anti-DDOS blocking) over 10 minute period through Columbus US location
  • Kevin Ohashi’s WP Performance Tester Winbench test (he’s the Review Signal guy)
  • Customer support reviews e.g. Trustpilot, Facebook, G2 Crowd
  • Malware detection and removal – is it free, paid or DIY?
  • Overall value for money

So What If The WPX CDN Has The DNS On The CDN?

If terms like ‘Domain Name Server’ (DNS) don’t mean anything to you, feel free to scroll down for the speed tests results.

Should you understand that term, it’s a potential speed bottleneck for page loading e.g.

And that’s why we moved the DNS to the WPX Cloud CDN, to further improve page loading speed, quite dramatically when we are looking for speed gains everywhere, reduced from 222 to 11 milliseconds in this case:

Which CDNs Are These Companies Using?

  • WPX: WPX Cloud (our own custom CDN, included in hosting price)
  • Siteground: Cloudflare (free version)
  • Cloudways: CloudwaysCDN (extra $1 per 25 Gb per website), rebranded Stackpath
  • Flywheel: Stackpath (extra $10 a month)
  • WP Engine: Stackpath (included in hosting price)
  • GoDaddy: N/A
  • Bluehost: N/A
  • Hostgator: N/A
  • A2: Cloudflare (free)
  • Kinsta: KeyCDN (included in hosting price)

With any of the above options, you can obviously also add any CDN you want to those, though that is an extra step in setup and may require additional expense. 

CAVEAT: The WPX Cloud is only for WPX customers, is switched on by default so no extra setup is required and it is not currently available as a standalone CDN service.

Which WP Hosting Plan Is Each Test Site On?

Prices are quoted on month-to-month MONTHLY subscriptions, NOT Annual or 2-Year+ plans or discounted 1st month/year deals where discounts may apply (as I was also testing Elementor speed for a separate comparison coming soon, I created a multi-site account at each but have quoted single site plan prices where relevant):

  • WPX: ‘Business Plan’ ($24.99 monthly, 5 websites, unlimited free Let’s Encrypt SSLs)
  • SiteGround: ‘GrowBig’ + Cloudflare (free) ($19.95 monthly but must be purchased in 1 year+ blocks)
  • Cloudways: Digital Ocean $10 monthly + extra charges for CDN (VPS so site slots not relevant)
  • Flywheel: ‘Tiny’ ($25 monthly inc $10 monthly for CDN, 1 website)
  • WP Engine: ‘Startup’ ($35 monthly, 1 website, $10 more monthly for UK hosting – why?)
  • GoDaddy: ‘Managed WordPress Ultimate’ ($19.99 monthly, 2 websites, SSL is extra $74.99 after 1st year)
  • Bluehost: ‘WP Pro’ ($27.99 monthly, ‘unlimited’ websites – more on that scam below)
  • Hostgator: WordPress Cloud Hosting ‘Standard Plan’ ($20.95 monthly, 2 websites)
  • A2: ‘3 Sites’ Managed WordPress Hosting (higher level than just ‘WordPress Hosting’, $55.04 monthly, 1-website version: $32.59 monthly) 
  • Kinsta: ‘Pro’ ($60 monthly, 2 websites, 1-website version: $30 monthly)

The Great Hosting Malware Removal "Gotcha!"

Malware can be broadly defined as software that attempts to gain unauthorized access to a computer and/or perform unauthorized actions on a targeted computer.

Such unauthorized access can be through an unintentional security vulnerability such as that found in the popular Revolution Slider plugin in 2017 by the original programmer or deliberately embedded scripts to perform various functions.

Free ‘nulled’ or ‘cracked’ versions of paid WP plugins are another notorious means through which malware infects sites.

All of this is a major security problem along with brute force attacks, DDOS, SQL injections etc.

And if you’re a digital marketer or SEO blogger or nature photographer or online entrepreneur, your knowledge level about malware detection and removal is probably [a] very low to zero, and [b] is not something you want to spend time on AWAY from growing your business.

That’s why malware detection & removal SHOULD BE a MAJOR consideration when thinking about which hosting company to use for your website/s.

If you have to spend a lot more on top of actual hosting to get malware detected and removed, then that’s basically MULTIPLYING the cost of hosting, isn’t it?

For example, SiteGround, one of the competitors here DO offer malware detection for $20 a year BUT expect you to buy a $200 a year Sucuri subscription (through their affiliate link) to REMOVE malware.

That means you can add $200 a year to the cost of hosting with SiteGround when compared to the other companies in this test, including WPX where malware is detected and removed daily for free, across all servers:

So who exactly removes malware for free and who does NOT?

  • WPX: malware removed free, daily
  • SiteGround: $200 Sucuri subscription recommended, malware not removed by SiteGround
  • Cloudways: $200 Sucuri subscription or Astra360 recommended, malware not removed by Cloudways
  • Flywheel: malware removed free, daily
  • WP Engine: “we are so confident you will not be hacked on our platform that in the rare event you are, we will pay a third party, Sucuri, to clean it up for free”
  • GoDaddy: wants $299.99 per year for malware removal
  • Bluehost: If site is infected they will switch it off and ask you to clean it or get SiteLock. For ‘Find’ Sitelock’ $24.99 per year, ‘Fix’ Sitelock $89.99 per year, ‘Prevent’ Sitelock $499.99 per year
  • Hostgator: Same as Bluehost above
  • A2: Offers DIY ‘malware removal tools’, malware not removed by A2, reseller for Sucuri $125 per cleanup
  • Kinsta: malware removed free, daily

If you have no idea how to clean up malware, see how this can skyrocket your hosting expenses?

To VPS Or Not?

In blogging and online business circles, there is a common perception that VPS-based hosting is superior to so-called ‘shared hosting’.

However, it’s more complicated than one being automatically superior to another.

For example:

Depending on the hosting platform (like Google Cloud or AWS directly), using VPS’s for your WordPress sites can require Sys Admin skills/knowledge and that’s a pretty deep area of expertise for a solopreneur, non-technical blogger or marketer.

That’s fine if you have or want to invest in developing those skills but at WPX, we find that the vast majority of our customers don’t have the time or interest in that and would rather that those issues were managed – hence ‘Managed WordPress Hosting’ – by us.

Also, there is absolutely no guarantee that a VPS will be faster than a well optimized and resourced shared host like WPX, Kinsta or WP Engine. 

And even a VPS or dedicated server still has finite resources, depending on how a site is (mis)configured.

In Matt Woodward’s recent speed shootout, the Amazon EC2 VPS was destroyed on speed by shared hosts like us and came dead last.

That was partly because it was a bog-standard VPS at AWS with zero optimization.

The question for you – if you’re attracted to hosting on a VPS – is whether you actually want to spend the time learning about the Web technologies that go into System Administration, if your VPS platform of choice requires that.

Finally, a VPS is NOT a whole dedicated server so you are still usually sharing server resources with others and who knows what they have going on resource-usage wise?

Server resources are finite and whether a server is running on a shared basis or VPSs, it’s all a matter of how well optimized, resourced and under/overloaded that server is.

What About Google's New WP Hosting Options?

And what about this new Google ‘WordPress High Availability (Beta)’ Service At $191.13 a month?

By the look of the interface, you will need some Sys Admin skills and Google don’t even offer ANY support on this near $200-a-month service!

Wow, that’s pretty arrogant! 

Not exactly managed for you then, even at those prices:

This time around, I also excluded Google’s Cloud WP hosting option at $24.27 monthly as it is not a managed solution, is unlikely to have ANY support if they don’t offer it on the $191 monthly plan, and setup instructions are:

Create a project in the Google Cloud Platform Console.

Enable billing for your project.

Install the Google Cloud SDK.

Enable Cloud SQL API.

Install Composer.

Create and configure a Cloud SQL for MySQL instance

Note: In this guide, we use wordpress for the instance name and the database name. We use root for the database user name.

Create a new Cloud SQL for MySQL Second Generation instance with the following command:

$ gcloud sql instances create wordpress 

–activation-policy=ALWAYS 

–tier=db-n1-standard-1

Note: you can choose db-f1-micro or db-g1-small instead of db-n1-standard-1 for the Cloud SQL machine type, especially for development or testing purposes. However, those machine types are not recommended for production use and are not eligible for Cloud SQL SLA coverage. See the Cloud SQL SLA for more details.

Create the database you want your WordPress site to use:

$ gcloud sql databases create wordpress –instance wordpress

Change the root password for your instance:

$ gcloud sql users set-password root 

–host=% 

–instance wordpress 

–password=YOUR_INSTANCE_ROOT_PASSWORD # Don’t use this password!

Kinsta, however, does use the Google Cloud for its hosting infrastructure, along with KeyCDN and you can see how they went in this drag race further below.

How Did WPX Hosting Do On Kevin Ohashi's 2019 WP Speed/Load Tests On ReviewSignal.com?

As Kevin published here, WPX Hosting was one of very few companies to achieve “Top Tier” status – the highest award he gives – in ALL their entered categories: in WPX’s case, under $25 (monthly), $25-$50 and $51-$100:

Results that prompted Kevin to conclude here that WPX Hosting did a “fantastic job” and delivered “a spectacular performance”:

Many companies also wanted Kevin to re-test, presumably unhappy with their original test result but WPX’s first and only result required no re-testing – even with that re-testing, many couldn’t get close to WPX’s speed:

Even the CEO of Servebolt, Erlend Eide, (their plans START at $99 a month for 3 websites, you could host 35 sites on WPX for that) acknowledged the impressive performance of (much cheaper) WPX Hosting when he blogged about their 2019 Ohashi result:

Return to Table of Contents

Start Your Engines Hosting Teams, Let's Race!

Firstly, let’s look at the GTMetrix.com results and you can click on any country location tab to see the first-last places in each location.

Individual results are also linked so you can go to GTMetrix or Pingdom Tools and check their results in more detail if you wish.

Should this TTFB (Time To First Byte) metric be unfamiliar to you, you can read more about it here.

REMINDER: services like these don’t keep results pages up forever so if you get a 404 missing page, just run the test URL/s on that platform again to see the current result.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

GTMetrix.com Results

Analysis:

OK, so let’s look at this drag race result in slow motion… 

When averaged across the 7 GTMetrix global testing locations, WPX came 1st, almost 2x the speed of the next competitor, Cloudways/Digital Ocean. 

WPX won in 6 out of 7 GTMetrix test locations with a 3-way dead heat for first in Vancouver, but WPX’s TTFB was 2x the speed of Kinsta there and the fastest TTFB of the 3 equal-first racers.

In North America, speed margins were pretty close but elsewhere, WPX’s winning margin was generally larger though Cloudways won in Sao Paulo, Brazil – Pingdom narrowly reversed that test result with a narrow win to WPX in Sao Paulo.

TTFB (Time To First Byte) metrics were more clear cut though with WPX comfortably beating all competitors here, in some cases by 10x or more. 

SiteGround’s NON-Cloudflare CDN site averaged a faster speed globally than the site with it enabled, beating its stablemate in 5 out of 7 testing locations. 

On average, GoDaddy, Bluehost and HostGator were the slowest performers here.

Pingdom Tools Divi Speed Results

Analysis

A frustrating aspect of Pingdom Tools is the way it (fails to) store past speed tests. Typically, when you click on such a link to a past test, the load time is correct but the TTFB and test location rotate. Anyways, you can re-run any of these tests a couple of times to get an accurate reading on Pingdom.

Kevin Ohashi Winbench Results

If you understand such things, here is what Kevin’s plugin tests:

  • Math – 100,000 math function tests
  • String Manipulation – 100,000 string manipulation tests
  • Loops – 1,000,000 loop iterations
  • Conditionals – 1,000,000 conditional logic checks
  • MySql (connect, select, version, encode) – basic mysql functions and 1,000,000 ENCODE() iterations
  • \$wpdb – 250 insert, select, update and delete operations through \$wpdb

LoadImpact.com Testing Results?

Ranked by lowest peak response time with 100 simultaneous users over 10 minutes from Columbus, US location (all loadimpact.com test links provided below):

* Couldn’t get a clean result here despite repeated attempts. Either the hosting failed through too many simultaneous users/ lack of server resources OR DDOS protection blocked the test.

Analysis:

As mentioned above, my personal benchmark for high-performance hosting is a sub-1 second load time from pretty much anywhere in the world AND the same under a simultaneous higher traffic load.

Apart from the failed Load Impact tests above, almost all of the hosts here did achieve a sub-1 second load time under heavy load from a US test location (Columbus). 

If you are only reliant on traffic from North America, all of these hosts that delivered a sub-1 second peak time here should be fine.

The reason that these numbers differ from the GTMetrix and Pingdom Tools tests so much is the testing location: US.

When speed testing was performed from outside the US with GTMetrix and Pingdom Tools, that’s when we saw the much bigger speed differences between hosts.

Winner of this test by 48 milliseconds: Siteground with free Cloudflare enabled.

If you find this research valuable, please Social Share this page now:

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Individual Comparisons

SiteGround Vs WPX

When you pay attention to the hosting conversations on Facebook and elsewhere, the biggest gripe that SiteGround customers express about them is their huge price increase when you renew your hosting plan with them.

For instance, the mid-range ‘GrowBig’ plan, the one used in this speed test, goes from $5.95 a month in Year 1 to $19.95 a month in Year 2 and onwards (malware removal is an optional $200 Sucuri yearly addon as SiteGround don’t do that themselves), and then you have to buy in annual blocks, no monthly option:

so you can only purchase hosting in yearly increments at SiteGround, after the trial period of 30 days and the 1 month trial attracts a $24.95 ‘setup fee’:

The 1st year has the sweetheart budget price but then from Year 2 onwards, that goes way up i.e. by 3-4x.

That’s obviously the SiteGround business model and entirely their choice but it seems to punish customer loyalty.

Here is the view of WordPress Hosting Facebook Group moderator, Tom DeBello, on SiteGround’s pricing strategy (published May 2019):

At WPX, we would like to keep and reward our customers forever by trying to remove as many friction points as possible and give potential customers great reasons to give our service a chance, in what is getting to be a pretty saturated marketplace.

BUT you say, at SiteGround, I can host ‘unlimited’ websites and have ‘unmetered’ data transfer on that plan:

Well if you check Siteground’s TOS here:

they state:

11.9. When using the Services, you will ensure that neither you nor any of your End Users make use of the Server resources to SiteGround’s detriment or that of other SiteGround customers.

In other words, they don’t explicitly say what their resource limits are, as far as I can see, but if you exceed them, your site/s could be disabled. 

And how can SiteGround measure something that is ‘unmetered’?

Does that sound unlimited or unmetered?

Personally I find this unmetered/unlimited promise a dark throwback to the suckerbait tactics of Hostgator/Bluehost/GoDaddy and creates unrealistic and unfulfillable (is that even a word?) customer expectations.

And here’s how those SiteGround customers can react when they discover those ‘unlimited’ limits:

When it comes to malware detection (but NOT removal), that’s a $20 yearly option and SiteGround do NOT remove malware from their customers’ sites – they encourage you to pay $200 a year to Sucuri through an affiliate link for that (both are free at WPX and performed daily across all WPX servers):

And if you think malware isn’t a big deal, check these estimates on how many sites are currently infected and under constant attack:

Here is the current checklist of malware detection/removal and DDOS protections included free for all WPX customers, you can read more on that here:

  • Custom and constantly updated WAF (Web Application Firewall)
  • Enterprise-level DDOS protection by Incapsula
  • Full daily system-wide malware scans
  • Full daily system-wide malware/malicious file removal
  • Cleanup of malicious redirects, backdoors and script injections
  • Daily updates to server security rules (see above)
  • Individual site audits in specific cases by WPX Malware Team

SiteGround also charge about $36 for each backup that their support manually restores for a customer (these are free and unlimited at WPX):

I also found it difficult to get to a live chat widget on SiteGround whereas we have them on every page on WPX, reminded me of the old ‘noreply@’ email address:

SiteGround also charge a $24.95 setup fee for the first trial month and an additional fee for malware detection, as mentioned above (those charges don’t exist at WPX):

In terms of the raw speed result, here’s what happened in this race-within-a-race:

GTMetrix.com Results

Pingdom Tools Divi Speed Results

Kevin Ohashi Winbench Results

Load Impact: SiteGround Vs WPX

* Couldn’t get a clean result here despite repeated attempts. Either the hosting failed through too many simultaneous users/ lack of server resources OR DDOS protection blocked the test.

Trustpilot/G2 Crowd/Facebook Customer Reviews

On Trustpilot, SiteGround are currently in 16th position out of 196 Web hosts there (WPX are at #1):

On G2 Crowd, SiteGround are 9th out of 261 companies in the ‘Web Hosting Providers’ category there:

while WPX is 1st out of 168 companies in the ‘Managed Web Hosting‘ category there:

On Facebook, SiteGround are not currently accepting or displaying Reviews/Recommendations:

whereas WPX has a rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on the opinions of 200 people there – all Reviews/Recommendations are shown:

SiteGround are also sticking with cPanel, for better or worse, depending on your perspective, when the newer generation of hosting services like Kinsta, WPX and WP Engine have abandoned it in favor of their own custom user panel.

Also, curiously in our testing, we found that the free Cloudflare CDN actually slowed down global performance on SiteGround in many cases – make of that what you will.

My main point on that is why would Cloudflare make their free CDN so good that nobody upgraded to the paid version?

See the above comparison table for the deets on the impact of the free Cloudflare CDN on the loading speed of a Divi site at SiteGround.

SiteGround also don’t specialize in a single platform like WordPress but cater to different CMSs: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, PrestaShop – whether that’s a positive or negative is up to you:

And in Matt Woodward’s recent multi-host speed test, he also tested support quality with this task, something that SiteGround failed:

This is how WPX performed in the same support quality test, according to Matt Woodward:

Finally, SiteGround, also headquartered in our city, do appear to have a solid support track record which is relatively rare in the hosting industry and their financial support of WordPress-related events, big and small, across the world is admirable.

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Cloudways Vs WPX

Unlike the other competitors in this high-speed shootout here, Cloudways is not, strictly speaking, a Web hosting service but more like a connector between you and some of the major Cloud companies (who you can also use directly, more on that below): Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon and Google Cloud.

And what I don’t get with Cloudways – and they do have a significant fanbase so I’m obviously missing something here – is that running your (WP) hosting via Cloudways does require some Sys Admin type skills e.g. these are some of your user admin pages in Cloudways:

And you will also see settings like this in your Cloudways admin panel (copied from my account there for this test) – the implication being that the user needs to know about Apache, OpCache, NGINX, WAF, Memcache, MySQL, New Relic, Varnish etc:

And though they seem to want to be called a ‘managed WordPress host’, such skills arguably push it well into self-managed territory:

Here is how the Owner/Moderator of the ‘WordPress Hosting’ Facebook Group summarized this Cloudways Vs WPX comparison on March 28 2019:

You can read here exactly how WPX defines what it manages and does not manage when it comes to ‘managed WordPress hosting’.

So why wouldn’t you just work directly on the Cloud platforms supported by Cloudways: Digital Ocean, Linode, Amazon, Google and/or Vultr and then SAVE the profit markup from Cloudways?

I could understand it if Cloudways massively simplified Cloud hosting and largely removed the need for Sys Admin-type knowledge and skills but if they don’t – and I don’t see it there – what exactly is the appeal of Cloudways?

Normally, the user admin areas of the above Cloud companies are notoriously difficult, technical and definitely not for normal bloggers or marketers who have no desire to learn VPS System Administration but I’m missing how Cloudways solves that issue.

If a blogger or solopreneur had those skills, they could just save on the cost of hosting by using Digital Ocean, Linode, Amazon, Google and Vultr directly, without Cloudways.

The Cloudways fans can enlighten me in the comments below.

I know with WPX that our main audience are usually NOT highly literate in Web technologies and we actually try to remove the need for them to spend any time on that when their main priority is growing their online business, ecommerce store or other niche blog type e.g.

It’s obvious that WPX Hosting and Cloudways appeal to different audiences but on a pure loading speed basis, WPX won this race and you can check any of the above results for yourself.

Also, I had assumed that the ‘CloudwaysCDN’ was their own custom CDN, as we have done with our ‘WPX Cloud’, heavily optimized for the WPX technology stack but actually as pages loaded via our Cloudways/DO-hosted site, it just looks like a rebranded Stackpath CDN.

That may also account for Cloudways losing the speed race here – by respectable margins mostly – as hosting services using 3rd party CDNs can’t normally optimize those for their own technology stack, which WPX can and does constantly.

On GTMetrix, WPX averaged close to double the speed of Cloudways/Digital Ocean and won in Dallas, London (just, with a 10X better TTFB), Sydney, Hong Kong, and Mumbai, with a dead heat in Vancouver (but WPX had a 5x better TTFB there) and Cloudways won in Sao Paulo.

GTMetrix.com Results

Pingdom Tools Divi Speed Results

Kevin Ohashi Winbench Results

Load Impact: Cloudways Vs WPX

Cloudways also has ZERO interest in malware removal, you’re on your own there or need to spend $200 a year at Sucuri (done free at WPX):

Trustpilot/G2 Crowd/Facebook Customer Reviews

On Trustpilot, Cloudways is currently 86th out of 196 Web hosts there:

while WPX is #1 out of 196 Web hosts on Trustpilot:

Cloudways has an average of 4.5 out of 5 from 581 Reviews on Facebook:

compared to WPX’s 4.9 out of 5 from 200 people on Facebook:

When it comes to G2 Crowd, Cloudways is currently ranked 7th (79%) in the ‘Managed Hosting Providers‘ category – WPX is #1 (94%):

One other final note on Cloudways is that the first site migration to them from another host is free but after that, I was quoted $25 per site migration in 3-4 days, longer if there were many sites.

I couldn’t access the site migration price without Cloudways calling me and they don’t publish that info on their site. Generally, Cloudways encourage you to use their free migration plugin (after the first free migration):

but in my experience with WPX, the migration of larger, more complex WordPress sites usually fails with an automated, plugin-based migration done by the hosting customer.

At WPX, all site migrations to us are free, regardless of the number of sites and usually done within 24 hours and are always done manually.

The exception to WPX’s ‘free migration forever’ policy is when a domain change is required and the resulting database work means that we charge for those types of more unusual migrations ($98 per site).

But there's another BIG potential problem with this flavor of 'Cloud Hosting':

Cloud companies like Digital Ocean issue a lot of free/supercheap trial offers and those get heavily abused by email spammers.

The end result – as reported here on May 28 2019 in the ‘WordPress Hosting’ private group on Facebook – is that Digital Ocean’s IPs get quickly blacklisted by anti-spam email services and email sent via that hosting option is therefore usually undeliverable (you will need the expense and hassle of a separate email service like Sendgrid, GSuite or O365; WPX has no such issues and is very protective of its IP integrity):

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Flywheel Vs WPX

UPDATE: During June 2019, WP Engine announced that they had acquired Flywheel. 

Given that the majority owner of WP Engine is now Silver Lake partners (one of GoDaddy’s main investors), we will see how this acquisition impacts Flywheels’ service, and if Silver Lake is using WP Engine to make such acquisitions less offensive to existing customers, given GoDaddy’s appalling reputation.

On May 1, 2019, Flywheel upped their pricing, notably the Starter Plan jumped from $15 a month to $25 a month for 1 website, though the Fastly CDN is now included in that – it used to be a $10 a month upsell on the $15 plan.

In comparison, WPX offers 5 website slots for $24.99 monthly while you get 1 slot on Flywheel.

If you want to host multiple websites at Flywheel, the next plan up from Starter is $115 a month for 10 sites.

For $100 a month, you could host 35 sites on WPX – CDN included – compared to 10 on Flywheel.

Speed-wise, here’s how Flywheel running on the Fastly CDN did compared to WPX Hosting. Again, a hosting company that can’t modify a 3rd party CDN for their own technology stack is going to be at a speed disadvantage and that proved to be the case here:

GTMetrix.com Results

Pingdom Tools Divi Speed Results

Kevin Ohashi Winbench Results

Load Impact: Flywheel Vs WPX

Trustpilot/G2 Crowd/Facebook Customer Reviews

Flywheel doesn’t have a focus on Trustpilot as their 5 reviews don’t qualify for a ranking among the 196 Web hosts listed there (compared to WPX, which is #1 out of 196 Web hosts):

Flywheel have closed the Reviews/Recommendations option on their Facebook page (compared to WPX’s 4.9 out of 5 from 200 people on Facebook):

On G2 Crowd, Flywheel are currently 13th out of the top 20 managed hosts with a 71% Satisfaction Score there (WPX are #1 with a 94% Satisfaction Score):

Flywheel does offer free site migrations and quotes 1-3 days for those with the option of a faster migration for $49 per site (“under 8 hours”): 

WPX usually completes free site migrations within 24 hours.

Importantly, Flywheel DOES offer free malware removal for its customers which is very good to see.

In Kevin Ohashi’s independent 2019 WP hosting performance testing, Flywheel was not awarded ‘Top Tier’ status in any category whereas WPX was awarded this highest accolade in all 3 entered categories: Under $25, $25-$50 and $51-$100:

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WP Engine Vs WPX

When I co-founded WPX Hosting back in 2013 (originally as Traffic Planet Hosting), WP Engine was the main obvious competitor that we were going after – particularly on the value equation side of things.

Feature-wise and even on speed, WP Engine were able to crush us back then but times have changed, something also independently verified here:

GTMetrix.com Results

Pingdom Tools Divi Speed Results

Kevin Ohashi Winbench Results

Load Impact: WP Engine Vs WPX

If we assume for a moment that loading speeds and features are about the same, hosting 1 site on WP Engine costs $35 a month (+ $10 more a month for UK hosting for no obvious reason, WPX charges the same for UK and US):

whereas hosting 5 sites on WPX is $24.99 monthly with no additional charge for UK hosting.

And GoDaddy’s owner, Silver Lake, is now a majority owner of WP Engine:

Here’s what has happened to Media Temple after being taken over by GoDaddy (many commenters on this WordPress Hosting FB Group post report a similar experience):

Trustpilot/G2 Crowd/Facebook Customer Reviews

On Trustpilot, WP Engine currently has a Trustscore there of 4.2 out of 10 and is 180th out of 196 Web hosts:

while WPX is ranked #1 out of 196 hosts on Trustpilot with a Trustscore of 9.8:

On G2 Crowd, WP Engine are currently 2nd (below WPX with 94%) for their Satisfaction Score with 89%:

Like Flywheel, WP Engine do not currently show or accept Reviews/Recommendations on their Facebook page (WPX have a rating of 4.9 out of 5 from 200 Reviews there):

And with support quality, Matt Woodward’s recent multi-host speed test of WP Engine, among others, including WPX (passed the test), this was the failed result for WP Engine:

You can also read about Matt Woodward’s difficult past experiences with WP Engine here.

My theory on Silver Lake’s ownership impact on WP Engine?

Apart from a likely Media Temple-style service decline (see above), given the recent WP Engine history of repeated price increases and proliferation of upsells, it seems likely to me that their future focus will be more on the Enterprise sector and less on smaller online business owners – certainly their ad copy is more Enterprise-targeted recently e.g.

WP Engine did not compete in Kevin Ohashi’s independent 2019 WP hosting performance tests where WPX was awarded the highest honor, ‘Top Tier’ status, in all 3 entered categories.

When it comes to malware removal, the WP Engine current policy is “we are so confident you will not be hacked on our platform that in the rare event you are, we will pay a third party, Sucuri, to clean it up for free.”

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GoDaddy Vs WPX

In my direct personal experience as a customer, the 3 worst hosting companies by far are Hostgator, Bluehost and GoDaddy.

Basically, endless (unnecessary) upsells, awful support and very slow, overloaded servers are the GoDaddy playbook rules.

Obviously Hostgator and Bluehost are owned by EIG and their reputation precedes them.

GoDaddy are not owned by EIG but Silver Lake Partners, now also the majority owner of WP Engine but GoDaddy’s practices are straight out of the EIG playbook.

That’s why GoDaddy comes in at #184 on Trustpilot out of 196 companies with a TrustScore of 3.1 out of 10:

But if we ignore the endless upsells and poor support experience at GoDaddy, how did their managed WordPress hosting service compare to WPX just on speed, on a dedicated WP plan ($19.99 monthly) rather than their usual cheap, slow hosting?

GTMetrix.com Results

Pingdom Tools Divi Speed Results

Kevin Ohashi Winbench Results

Load Impact: GoDaddy Vs WPX

* Couldn’t get a clean result here despite repeated attempts. Either the hosting failed through too many simultaneous users/ lack of server resources OR DDOS protection blocked the test.

And what about on price? In this case. I chose the 2-site ‘Ultimate’ plan, normally $19.99 monthly (half price in first month, like A2, prices vary often here, these were the prices when the test account was created):

but after Year 1, an SSL certificate is $79.99 yearly at GoDaddy whereas WPX uses free unlimited Let’s Encrypt SSLs.

On the above support quality test from Matt Woodward’s article, GoDaddy were not featured in that test, so nothing to report here.

With G2 Crowd reviews, GoDaddy comes in at 6th with an 81% customer satisfaction rating while WPX is at #1 with a 94% rating: 

GoDaddy did compete against WPX in the under $25 category of Kevin Ohashi’s independent 2019 WP hosting performance tests on ReviewSignal.com where WPX was awarded the highest honor, ‘Top Tier’ status, in all 3 entered categories:

GoDaddy were not awarded Top Tier status, unlike WPX, and Kevin wrote about GoDaddy that:

When it comes to malware removal, GoDaddy wants an additional $299.99 per year for that. Ouch!

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Bluehost Vs WPX

If you look around the Web, you will soon find a lot of rage about EIG-owned hosting companies in general and Bluehost in particular.

Apart from a long record of poor customer service like this, where they are almost last out of 196 Web hosts with a TrustScore of 1.4 out of 10:

and failed to crack the top 20 Managed Hosts on G2 Crowd where WPX is #1:

my biggest beef with Bluehost is their long history of misleading marketing, especially when it comes to ‘unlimited’ this and ‘unmetered’ that, a scam they’re still running today e.g.

When you dig into the relevant area of their TOS, it’s a different but depressingly familiar story and why sites on Bluehost can go offline mid-launch or mid-email promotion when traffic starts to spike (speaking from personal experience here):

To reiterate, server resources are finite and promising things that won’t be delivered on like ‘No Traffic Limits’, ‘Unlimited Web Storage’ and ‘Unlimited Websites’ is just suckerbait that Bluehost can’t and won’t honor.

They’ve been pulling this con forever but apparently the FTC is asleep at the wheel.

It makes you wonder why some bigger name internet marketing gurus and WP blogs still promote Bluehost as affiliates to their audiences despite the really sucky service and support – sweetheart affiliate commission deals perhaps, despite the damage to their credibility, if they care.

In fact, it was precisely this kind of behavior from Bluehost and Hostgator that motivated me to create WPX Hosting back in 2013.

Also, and this is on Bluehost’s most expensive new flagship WP hosting option, ‘WP Pro’, the first 2 plans are NOT supported on Live Chat. Even the entry level plan doesn’t even get ticket support by the look of it, just email I guess – not good enough in 2019, Bluehost:

But let’s exclude that dishonesty from Bluehost’s pitch and focus solely on the drag race which is what we’re here for, right?

GTMetrix.com Results

Pingdom Tools Divi Speed Results

Kevin Ohashi Winbench Results

Load Impact: Bluehost Vs WPX

Pricing and value-wise, Bluehost’s WP Pro must be bought in 3 month minimum blocks, no monthly option and it’s $27.95 a month when purchased in 3-month blocks – suddenly that famous Bluehost/HostGator ‘super cheap’ appeal is looking more like WPX/Kinsta/WP Engine type pricing:

Perhaps worse is that Bluehost’s supposedly best WP hosting offering, WP Pro, was crushed in this speed test.

On the above support quality test from Matt Woodward’s article, Bluehost were not featured in that test, so nothing to report here.

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HostGator Vs WPX

When it comes to HostGator, there isn’t a lot more to add that hasn’t been said above already about Bluehost and GoDaddy.

To summarize if you don’t want to scroll up, the HostGator playbook goes something like:

– endless (unnecessary) upsells
– slow, ancient, overloaded servers because their business model doesn’t support anything better
– terrible support (see here and here)
– ‘unlimited’ plans that make sites go offline as soon as they hit, you know, the limits e.g.

Shall we just go to the speed results?

GTMetrix.com Results

Pingdom Tools Divi Speed Results

Kevin Ohashi Winbench Results

Load Impact: HostGator Vs WPX

* Couldn’t get a clean result here despite repeated attempts. Either the hosting failed through too many simultaneous users/ lack of server resources OR DDOS protection blocked the test.

In the case of the support quality test in Matt Woodward’s recent WP host speed test, here is how HostGator went (WPX passed the test):

and it’s a pretty grim picture for HostGator over at Trustpilot.com, literally last out of 196 Web hosts with a TrustScore of 0.8  where WPX is #1 out of 196 Web hosts with a TrustScore of 9.8  there:

while on G2 Crowd, HostGator is not in the top 20 category for Web Hosts or Managed Hosting Providers (WPX is #1 in the second category):

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A2 Vs WPX

To generalize, A2 seemingly presents as a fairly typical ‘cheap’ hosting option e.g.

but I wanted to test their best performance package so went for their Managed WordPress Hosting ‘Triple Site’ (3 websites plan) – they also offer ‘normal’ WordPress Hosting, unmanaged I guess, and here the price skyrocketed:

from an advertised $18.99 a month up to:

$55.04 monthly on a month-to-month subscription, for just 3 websites, even an annual subscription would be $50.96 monthly.

50 bucks a month at WPX would get you 15 website slots:

In fact, as far as I can tell, the $18.99 monthly figure would only be for the 1st month and then the remaining months would be, at best $38.25 monthly (with a 3 year commitment).

However, we could also opt for the ‘1-site’ plan on their top level ‘Managed WordPress Hosting’ service but again, this would be $32.59 monthly after the first discounted month: 

So with our $50 a month for 3 websites at A2, we get all these speed optimizing features and their ’20x Turbo’:

Sounds like they will give WPX a run for its money when it comes to a page loading speed drag race…but no, WPX was 2-5x faster than A2 on average across all tests on GTMetrix, Pingdom Tools, Winbench and Load Impact (and significantly cheaper on price/website slots):

GTMetrix.com Results

Pingdom Tools Divi Speed Results

Kevin Ohashi Winbench Results

Load Impact: A2 Hosting Vs WPX

Did you also notice how A2 is promising the old ‘unlimited’ angles, straight out of the Bluehost/Hostgator suckerbait playbook?

But when we look more closely at the A2 Terms of Service fine print here, they say:

How on earth is that unlimited and when is the hosting industry going to leave this scam behind?

On Trustpilot.com, A2 doesn’t seem to have a rank out of 196 hosts at the moment but their TrustScore is 7.8 out of 10 while WPX is currently #1 on Trustpilot with a TrustScore of 9.8 out of 10:

and on G2 Crowd, A2 is currently 19th in the Managed Hosting Providers category:

while WPX is #1 in the same category:

On the above support quality test from Matt Woodward’s article, A2 were not featured in that 7-way speed test, so also nothing to report here.

When it comes to malware removal, A2 do NOT remove malware for customers but do offer some “malware removal tools”. WPX removes malware daily from all WPX customers for free.

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Kinsta Vs WPX

Kinsta and WPX have quite a bit in common.

We both launched around 2013, both have focused only on Managed WordPress Hosting and both have a strong commitment to innovation and improving the quality of hosting service and support.

In the actual execution and business model, however, we have come at WordPress hosting from pretty different angles.

Instead of buying or renting their own servers, Kinsta opted to use the Google Cloud and build out their service on that platform, while using KeyCDN as an included service.

At WPX, we have always bought our own servers, the highest possible spec available at the time of purchase and then deliberately UNDERloaded them with hosting accounts.

We chose to go that way for flexibility and control and don’t want to have to fit in with the policies and hardware options offered by any Cloud company.

For the same reasons, we developed our own Content Delivery Network, the WPX Cloud, our not-so-secret speed weapon in the above tests and Matt Woodward’s here.

Kinsta also charges a LOT more than WPX.

For example, until May 2018, the entry-level plan at Kinsta was $100 a month for 1 website. You can host 35 websites at WPX for that monthly price.

This pricing model probably reflected Kinsta’s strategy of targeting more enterprise-level customers, whereas WPX is a better fit for digital marketers, solopreneurs, bloggers and various kinds of small online business owners.

After May 2018, Kinsta slashed the price of their 1-site, entry level plan to $30 a month. 

At WPX, you can get a 5-website plan for $24.99 a month.

Also, Kinsta, like WP Engine, does not offer email at all as a free or paid addon whereas email is free at WPX and personally I think that hosting companies should offer and include email, even in 2019. 

With site migrations to Kinsta, only the first one is free while inbound migrations are free and unlimited at WPX.

On average across all GTMetrix and Pingdom Tools tests, WPX was 2-3x faster on page loading than Kinsta and costs considerably less, IF you are hosting more than one website.

WPX also won by a significant margin on the Winbench test in both categories and maintained a 4x speed advantage over Kinsta during Load Impact testing with 100 simultaneous users.

GTMetrix.com Results

Pingdom Tools Divi Speed Results

Kevin Ohashi Winbench Results

Load Impact: Kinsta Vs WPX

On the support quality test in Matt Woodward’s recent WP host speed test, here is how Kinsta went (WPX passed the test):

In terms of Trustpilot.com reviews, Kinsta are sitting at 12th out of 196 Web hosts whereas WPX is at #1 there:

Over on G2 Crowd, Kinsta are in 4th place in the Managed Hosting Providers category while WPX is #1 there:

With malware removal, Kinsta states that: “We monitor all sites with us constantly and, should there be an issue, assist you in removing it at no additional charge.  This will result in a new WordPress core installation and, if any themes or plugins are infected, removal of that component.”

 WPX removes malware daily from all WPX customers for free WITHOUT a new core WP installation usually.

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Conclusions From This Race?

Now that you can see all the test URLs and speed results, I highly encourage you to test these sites yourself on your own preferred speed testing tools.

It is also important to remember that a poorly configured or UNoptimized site can be very very slow, regardless of hosting quality.

It’s not any accident that – in my humble opinion – WPX offers pretty much unbeatable value on speed, support, load handling and even security.

We designed it that way, for users like you (if you managed to read this far!).

Yet if we only focus on page loading speed for Divi (or most likely any other page building platform like Elementor or Thrive Architect or popular themes like Avada, X or Astra), WPX beat all other 9 competitors, some by a huge margin and often comprehensively beating more expensive options like WP Engine and Kinsta.

I welcome  the next round of speed ‘drag races’ with the above hosts and any other challengers.

Post your questions below please.

Terry Kyle
Chief Dog Lover/CEO
WPX Hosting
PS: check out WPX’s commitment to helping homeless & shelter dogs here

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Bonus DVD Material

How do I learn more about the Divi page builder?

In this interview with the founder of Elegant Themes, Nick Roach, he explains the dealio with Divi:

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