Here’s the first Monthly Hosting Performance Contest Roundup for February 2016!
Hosts have been tested non-stop during the whole month and here are the results.
By the way, you can find the latest roundups here and the performance tables and charts here.
Intro
As you may already know, I’ve been monitoring the performance of some of the best hosting providers I know.
In short, since 2013 I’ve been picking out great hosts judging by real users reviews, professional hosting community opinion, long honorable business experience and other factors which make a great hosting.
And I buy anonymously hosting accounts with some of these hosts in order to closely monitor their performance (basically, uptime checked every minute and full page load time checked every 15 minutes) using a professional monitoring service monitis.com. I buy the most basic plan of each hosting. You can read about my monitoring methodology here.
And I’m happy to share these statistics with you so that you could see how these hosts perform and who is the best from the best!
You can find real-time performance charts on my recommended hosts page for the hosting which I’ve been monitoring.
Also, you may read more information about this Hosting Performance Contest on this page. I will be adding monthly and yearly Contest results on that page too.
February 2016 Hosting Performance Contest – Results
I’ve been monitoring three affordable hosting this month – VeeroTech, HawkHost and StableHost.
And the winner of this month’s contest is VeeroTech!
Its average full page load time is 1.18 seconds. Uptime is 99.97%. And Satisfactory Apdex is 99.8% (i.e. 99.8% of time the full page load time was less than 2.5 seconds). All these parameters are great.
Among the hosts which have satisfied uptime benchmark level (99.9%), VeeroTech has shown the fastest average full page load time during the whole month. And it let it win the golden medal. And its Satisfactory Apdex is 99.8%, which is good (above 99% benchmark).
HawkHost won the second place with a little bit slower loading time (1.27 seconds), similar uptime (99.98%) and Satisfactory Apdex 99.91%.
StableHost was put on the third place because of comparatively lower uptime (99.73%), which did not let it pass my uptime benchmark level. Its Satisfactory Apdex is 99.6%, which is not bad. And its average full page load time is the fastest and very good – 0.88 seconds. StableHost could be the winner, if its uptime were above 99.9%.
Here’s a table view to compare the Hosting Performance Contest results in February 2016:
Table column notes:
Place: The place a hosting has won in this Contest (the less the better).
Load Time: Average Full Page Load Time (the less the better).
Uptime: Uptime (the more the better).
Uptime OK: If Uptime Benchmark (99.9%) passed (YES is very good, NO is not very good).
Apdex-S: Satisfactory Apdex, i.e. how often a test website on a tested hosting was loading faster than 2.5 sec (the more the Apdex-S the better).
Apdex-S OK: If Satisfactory Apdex benchmark (99%) passed (YES is very good, NO is not very good).
And here are the charts with the Hosting Performance Contest results in February 2016:
February 2016 Hosting Performance Contest Results – Notes
I use monitis.com services for uptime and full page load monitoring. The monitoring is performed from two locations in order to decrease chances of false alerts and make monitoring results more objective. You can read more about my methodology of monitoring here.
Here are the monthly monitoring reports screenshots:
These monitor checks are performed with 1-minute interval, which makes it great for detecting website uptime and downtime.
So, we need Uptime values from this table for finding the winner of our Contest.
By the way, downtime is detected if server response time (time-to-first-byte) is more than 10 seconds.
Other values (just for information):
– Response time is not that important for this Contest, because I’ve got a better indicator monitored, which is Full page load time (see below).
– Number of failures may be interesting to look at, but this is just an additional information to Uptime, which is more important for the overall hosting evaluation.
StableHost with its 99.73% uptime had not the best performance this month. It means that my test website was down for 112.8 minutes in total this month. This is below my accepted highest standards for 99.9% uptime (uptime benchmark) which is equal to 41.7 minutes downtime in February 2016.
That’s why this month StableHost could not be considered to be a winner in this Contest in February 2016. Although as we’ll see below, its full page load time was the fastest among other competitors this month, which makes it still a good competitor.
VeeroTech was 0.03% (12.5 minutes) down in total this month.
And HawkHost was down 0.02% (8.4 minutes) down in this month.
Both these hosts have passed Uptime benchmark test (99.9%) and could fight for the gold.
These tests are performed with 15-minute interval. It makes it a perfect real-user performance monitor. This monitor’s activity is equal to 192 unique visitors per day (about 5,760 unique visitors per month).
Avg Test Duration is the Full page load time, which is very clear and important factor for the Hosting Performance Contest.
We don’t need Uptime from this table because we have got a better (more precise) Uptime indicator from the previous table.
Also, we don’t need Failures from this table, because it’s less precise than the same indicator from the previous table.
But we will need Apdex, particularly its S (Satisfactory) part. This shows how much time (in %) the website loaded faster than 2.5 seconds. I call it Satisfactory Apdex.
VeeroTech won the first prize because it have passed both benchmark tests (Uptime and Satisfactory Apdex) and had the best Full page load time.
It’s worth noting that StableHost is the fastest host in this Contest, but it also had the worst uptime among the three monitored hosts.
HawkHost performance in this month was good, but VeeroTech was better.
Conclusion
The winner of February 2016 Hosting Performance Contest is VeeroTech. Its performance and reliability are very good.
StableHost had very good chances to win the Contest, because it is very fast. But its uptime was below the best-of-the-best threshold and that’s why it did not make it.
HawkHost surely took the second place showing a very good performance and reliability.
After all, all these hosts are great. And this Contest has just detected the best of the best in February 2016!
BTW, I respect your privacy, and of course I don't send spam, affiliate offers or trade your emails. What I send is information that I consider useful.
Too bad https://kickassd.com is not on here! Been with them for about 8 months now with some heavy traffic sites I used to have on a 4GB DO droplet. Their largest plan hosts them without an issue and really fast.
Hey Doug, thanks for your comment.
I’m glad your host is working well for you!
Hi Michael,
Any time I enjoyed the read. Will you make a review on kickassd in the future?
Hey Doug,
Unfortunately, I can’t say if I make a review of any particular host in the future.
Anyway, thanks for your suggestion.