Hosting Performance Contest March 2016 Roundup

Here’s the second Monthly Hosting Performance Contest Roundup for March 2016!
I’ve been testing hosts in a non-stop manner the whole month and will show you the results now.

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 as well as some other well-known hosts.

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.

 

March 2016 Hosting Performance Contest – Results

I’ve been monitoring four affordable hosting this month – VeeroTech, StableHost, HawkHost and GlowHost.

And the winner of this month’s contest is StableHost!
And very close to the winner goes VeeroTech.

Average full page load time of StableHost was 1.17 seconds. Uptime was 99.99%. And Satisfactory Apdex was 99.92% (i.e. 99.92% of time the full page load time was less than 2.5 seconds). All these parameters are brilliant and above the benchmarks specified for the great performance. And for being the fastest host StableHost wins the gold.

Almost together with the winner but little behind comes VeeroTech, which was the winner of the February 2016 contest.

In March 2016 VeeroTech was on average as fast as 1.19 seconds that is just 0.02 seconds slower than StableHost.
VeeroTech‘s uptime was 99.93% which is very good.
Its Satisfactory Apdex was the same as StableHost had (99.92% of all time full page load time was less than 2.5 seconds).

Other monitored hosts have also satisfied uptime benchmark level (99.9% or above).

HawkHost takes the solid third place with 99.9% uptime and also very fast performance – full page load time was 1.26 seconds on average. Its Satisfcatory Apdex was 99.88% which is pretty above 99% and it makes it also a fast hosting with a stable great performance.

GlowHost goes to the fourth place in March 216 contest. But it showed quite good uptime (99.93%) and not bad speed (2.31 seconds) on avarage. However its Satisfcatory Apdex was 90.64% which is below 99% which is set up as a benchmark for a great hosting.

In other words, GlowHost was generaly fast and 90.64% of all time it was faster than 2.5 seconds, but in the rest of time (9.36%) of all time it was slower than 2.5 seconds. That’s why this month GlowHost can’t be put in one row with the best of the best hosts in this month.

I know that these criteria for the best of the best hosting are pretty strong. But this is the contest!

Here’s a table view to compare the Hosting Performance Contest results in March 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 March 2016:

 

 

 

March 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.

All monitored hosts have shown great uptime above 99.9% – the uptime benchmark which is equal to 44.6 minutes downtime in March 2016.

StableHost has shown brilliant uptime in March 2016. It was down just 0.01% which is just 4.5 minutes during tho whole month. It’s very good for a shared hosting.

VeeroTech, who has taken the second place in March 2016 Contest, was 0.03% (13.4 minutes) down in total this month. It’s also pretty good.

HawkHost was down 0.1% (44.6 minutes) in this month. This was still good and enough to be considered one of the best hosting. However, its uptime was exactly on the edge of the uptime benchmark which is set for the best hosts.

And GlowHost was 99.96% up and 0.04% (17.9 minutes) down this month. This is good.

Thus, all 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.

StableHost 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 VeeroTech was almost as fast as the winner in this Contest.

HawkHost performance in this month was also very good.

And GlowHost was behind the others regarding the speed. And although its average speed was quite good (less than 2.5 seconds), its Satisfactory Apdex was 90.64% which is below the highest standards (99%).

 

Conclusion

The winner of March 2016 Hosting Performance Contest is StableHost. Its performance and reliability are brilliant.

VeeroTech has taken a very solid silver medal being just a little bit slower than the winner.

HawkHost took the third place showing a very good performance and reliability.

GlowHost could compete in the same line as the best hosts in this Contest but it was slower than the leaders. And that’s why it could take only the last place.

After all, all three leaders in this Contest are great hosts. And this Contest has just detected the best of the best in March 2016!

P.S.: Past and future Hosting Performance Contest results are (and will be) published on this page.
Also, you can see real-time performance charts of the hosts I monitor as well as historical data on the hosting performance on this page.
And my recommended hosts are here.