Here’s the seventh Monthly Hosting Performance Contest Roundup for August 2016!
I’ve been testing 15 hosts in a non-stop manner the whole month and you are about to see the results right now. The competing for the title of the best hosts in August Contest was challenging!
By the way, you can find the latest roundups here and the performance tables and charts here.
This month I added MDDHosting to compete in the most affordable class hosting category.
All monitored hosts are presented in the pricing categories according to the most affordable plan they have.
Let’s see how the hosts stand against each other!
Common Information
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 different 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 and the cheapest 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 some real-time performance charts on my recommended hosts page for the hosting which I’ve been recommending and monitoring.
Also, you can see real-time monitoring charts for all hosts that I am monitoring on this page. In addition, the page contains monthly historical data on hosting performance (speed, uptime, satisfactory apdex) – very interesting and useful.
Besides, you may read more information about this Hosting Performance Contest on this page. I will be adding monthly and yearly Contest results on the page too.
And other monthly Hosting Performance Contest roundups are available from here.
August 2016 Hosting Performance Contest – Results
Here are the fifteen hosts that you can compare this month. I’ve broken down them in three groups: very affordable (below $4/mo), middle class (upto $8/mo) and more expensive ($8+/mo).
- VeeroTech (I recommend it, here’s my review)
- GeekStorage (I recommend it, here’s my review)
- SiteGround (I recommend it, here’s my review)
- MDDHosting (I recommend it, here’s my review)
- Squidix (I recommend it, here’s my review)
- StableHost (I recommend it, here’s my review)
- HawkHost (I recommend it, here’s my review)
- InMotionHosting
- A2Hosting
- MochaHost
- LunarPages
- HostWinds
- Eleven2
- GreenGeeks
- GlowHost
You’ll see a breakdown of hosting performance by prices in the sections below.
Let’s start from an overview of the hosting performance in the order of how the hosts performed in general regardless of how affordable or expensive the hosts are.
The winner of this month’s contest is InMotionHosting!.
Very close to the top go several hosts: A2Hosting and VeeroTech.
By the way, whereas the first two leaders are from the most expensive pricing category, VeeroTech is from the most affordable one (great achievement)!
Average full page load time of InMotionHosting (the winner) was 1.24 seconds (it’s fast). Its Uptime was 99.98% (very good) And its Satisfactory Apdex was 99.34% (i.e. 99.34% of time the full page load time was less than 2.5 seconds – it’s quite good). All these parameters are above the benchmarks specified for the great performance. And since this hosting was the fastest host among the hosts which exceeded all the benchmarks determined for the great hosts InMotionHosting wins the gold medal.
The silver medal goes to A2Hosting. it was very close the the winner in the matter of speed but just little behind.
In August 2016 A2Hosting was on average as fast as 1.27 seconds that is just 0.03 seconds slower than the leader. A2Hosting‘s uptime was 99.96% which is also great. Its Satisfactory Apdex was perfect 99.69% (i.e. 99.69% of all time full page load time of my website hosted with it was less than 2.5 seconds). Good results!
The bronze medalist is VeeroTech. It’s a great affordable host which managed to get to the winners among more expensive competitors this month. Congrats!
VeeroTech performed in August 2016 as fast as 1.56 seconds which is pretty good. Its uptime was nearly perfect 99.99%. And the Satisfactory Apdex was 99.03% (99.03% of all time the speed was faster than 2.5 seconds, it’s above the highest standards set for great hosting).
I’d like to emphasize that VeeroTech performed not only above the highest standards, but it was the host from the most affordable pricing category, and nevertheless it could get to the winners of this Contest!
HostWinds took the 4th place with 1.62 seconds speed, high uptime (99.99%) and Satisfactory Apdex (99.51%).
MDDHosting was following the above host pretty close – just 0.02 seconds slower. So, the 5th place for MDDHosting with great performance (1.64 sec full page load time, 99.94% uptime, 99.53% Satisfactory Apdex). By the way, this host is also from the most affordable pricing category!
LunarPages took the 6th place. Its 1.65 seconds full page load time was a little bit behind MDDHosting (the competence was challenging!) Its uptime (99.98%) was pretty good. And its Satisfactory Apdex (99.89%) was above the benchmark.
Other hosts could not meet at least one of the benchmarks set for the best hosting, though the results of some hosts were still not bad. Just see how much the performance is far from the benchmark levels.
GeekStorage has taken the 7th place. From a speed point of view, it was the fastest of all monitored hosts (1.07 seconds full page load time), but its uptime (99.84%) was a little below the benchmark (99.9%). That’s why it did not win the gold. Its Satisfactory Apdex was very good 99.82%.
SiteGround is on the 8th place, but its speed (1.55 seconds) uptime (99.98%) were very good. Onle because its Satisfactory Apdex (98.93%) fell just a little below the level set for the best hosts (99%).
StableHost has been breathing down the above hosts. High speed (1.62 secs), but a little bit less uptime (99.88%) than the benchmark (99.9%). Its Satisfactory Apdex (99.55%) was good and above the highest standards. In the general standings StableHost is on the 9th place.
GreenGeeks goes to the 10th place. It was as fast as StableHost, but its uptime (99.82%) and Satisfactory Apdex (99.03%) were a bit lower.
MochaHost is on the 11th place. Both its uptime (99.78%) and Satisfactory Apdex (98.24%) did not meet the benchmarks. And its speed was lower than the above hosts (1.68 seconds).
Squidix goes to the 12th place with its speed 1.69 seconds. But its uptime (99.95%) is better than some of the above hosts and above the benchmark level (99.9%). What did not work very well for this host is its Satisfactory Apdex which was 97.86% (97.86% of time its Full page load time was below 2.5 seconds).
Eleven2 took the 13th place. Its speed (1.78 seconds) was not the fastest, but what failed indeed are uptime (99.71%) and Satisfactory Apdex (96.97%). Both these parameters were below the standards for great hosting.
HawkHost took just the 14th place because its Satisfactory Apdex (98.79%) did not meet the highest standards (99%). Yes, it was close, but not this time. Its speed (1.85 seconds) was slower than most of the other hosts, but its uptime (99.94%) was pretty good.
And the outsider is GlowHost is on the last, 15th place. And traditionally, this host could not get from the last place. This month it showed great uptime (99.98%), but it’s speed was still bad (2.62 seconds). And its Satisfactory Apdex (54.98%) decreased even more and was again far below the benchmark level (99%). So, there is no chance for this host to get higher in this Contest standings if it does not improve its speed.
Generally, the competition this month was interesting. Due to many hosts falling below the benchmark levels which are set for great hosting, the positions pretty much changed and mixed compared to the previous month. But was really surprising is that some hosts from the most affordable pricing category outperformed many of the more expensive hosts.
By the way, keep in mind, that for this Contest I pick out the hosts which are considered to be good, great and superb. These hosts are established businesses for many years and some of them are widely recommended in the Internet. So, the idea of this Contest is to determine the best performing hosts from a technical point of view, giving you objective information for making your own decision regarding hosts.
Let’s see now the results in tables and charts for more convenience, more information and more insight.
Here’s a table view to compare the Hosting Performance Contest results in August 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). Checked every 15 minutes.
Uptime: Uptime (the more the better). Checked every minute.
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). Checked every 15 minutes.
Apdex-S OK: If Satisfactory Apdex benchmark (99%) passed (YES is very good, NO is not very good).
Here’s a table with hosting prices:
1 year: Regular prices (after the first invoice) for 1-year plan.
2 years: Regular prices (after the first invoice) for 2-year plan.
3 years: Regular prices (after the first invoice) for 3-year plan.
Min Price: The minimum price officially available for the first invoice (can be for 1-year, 2-year or 3-year plan).
*StableHost discount code is given in my review.
Limited-time offers with more discounts are not included in these prices. Check out if there are special offers currently available by visiting the hosting websites.
Worthy: This column contains my recommended hosts. (Under review label means that the host is a newcomer which performs not bad or has potential in winning prizes in the Contest and I want to have proved records of its performance for a couple of months.)
Here’s a table with places within pricing categories:
Since it’s not always correct to compare hosts from different price categories together, I’ve broken down the monitored hosts into three categories to compete within as you can see above in the table.
The prices presented in this table are regular prices (i.e. applied after the first invoice). Note that prices for the first invoice (1-,2- or 3-year plan) are usually less (see them in the previous table). And special promo prices are not included (check them out on the hosting websites).
And here are the charts with the Hosting Performance Contest results in August 2016:
August 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.
Five last hosts on the screenshot have not passed the uptime benchmark test for great hosting. The other hosts I’m monitoring were up more than 99.9% in August. Websites on the five failed hosting were not available for more than 44.6 minutes in total this month.
Here are some uptime details for the hosts in the order of the places the hosts took in the Contest in August 2016:
InMotionHosting had pretty good uptime 99.98%. It was not available 0.02% of the time which equals about 8.9 minutes this month.
A2Hosting had 99.96% uptime (and not available for about 17.9 minutes).
VeeroTech performed very well with 99.99% uptime. My site hosted with it was not available 0.01% (a bit less than 4.5 minutes) in August. Very good for the affordable host like this. Uptime for my other testing account (Veerotech-2 on the screenshot) also passed very well the benchmark for great hosts.
HostWinds improved its uptime and this month it was 99.99%. It’s a great result. It was not available for less than 4.5 minutes this month.
MDDHosting performed pretty well with 99.94% uptime. My site hosted with it was not available 0.06% of time (a bit less than 26.8 minutes) in August. Really not bad for the affordable plan on this hosting I’m using.
LunarPages showed very good uptime 99.98%. And 0.02% (about 8.9 minutes) being unavailable is a solid result.
GeekStorage had a bit lower uptime (99.84%) than the highest standards (99.9%). My site hosted with it was not available for 71.4 minutes.
SiteGround performed very well with 99.98% uptime. this motnh my site with this host was not available for about 8.9 minutes.
StableHost had 99.88% uptime. It makes 0.12% (53.6 minutes) when the site on this host was not available. Not really bad result for this affordable host, but not enough to get into the list of the leading hosts.
GreenGeeks failed with its uptime. 99.82% uptime and 0.18% (1.34 hours) being down from a user point of view. Not very good.
MochaHost also failed its uptime (just 99.78%). Accordingly, 0.22% of time being not available. From user point of view it was down for 1.64 hours. Not good.
Squidix was quite good with uptime this month (99.95%). The site on this hosting was not available 0.05% of the time in August (about 22.3 minutes). It’s strongly above the highest standards.
Eleven2 could not improve its uptime compared to the previous month and failed. My website on this host was up 99.71%, which means no one could access my website on this hosting 0.29% of the time in this month (equals to 2.16 hours). Bad and pretty much below the highest standards.
HawkHost was good with 99.94% uptime. My website with this hosting was not available for 26.8 minutes in this month.For this budget host it’s a great result.
GlowHost, unlike some previous months, passed uptime tests (99.98%). It was not available 0.02% of the time (8.9 minutes). It was great from uptime point of view.
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.
InMotionHosting won the gold because it has passed both benchmark tests (Uptime and Satisfactory Apdex) and had the best Full page load time (1.24 sec) among the hosts which have also passed both benchmarks. Well done in August!
A2Hosting was quite close to the winner, but being a little bit slower (1.27 sec) made it the second with the silver medal. Very good!
VeeroTech got the bronze medal among all the hosts with pretty good speed – 1.56 seconds and passing all the benchmarks.
HostWinds performed well in this month. Its speed was 1.62 seconds which is good. Its uptime and Satisfactory Apdex were good enough to make this host take this relatively high place in the contest.
MDDHosting got not far behind the leaders showing good speed – 1.64 seconds and passing all the benchmarks. Good result for the affordable plan I’m using on this host.
LunarPages was also fast (1.65 seconds full page load time). It’s a good result for the the budget plan I’m using with this host.
GeekStorage was an exciting disappointment for its fans. On the one hand it had the greatest speed among all the hosts (1.07 sec). And it could easily win the gold, but its uptime was a bit below the highest standards. Next month it has good chances to win them all! We’ll see.
SiteGround showed very good speed (1.55 seconds). If its Satisfactory Apdex were a little bit higher, than it could win the prize.
StableHost performed not bad from a speed point of view (1.62 sec). But some of the other hosts were faster and had greater uptime.
GreenGeeks was quite fast in general (1.62 seconds full page load time), but my site with it was too often not available (99.82%) which made it behind many other hosts.
MochaHost had generally a good speed (1.68 sec). But it failed in both uptime and Satisfactory Apdex benchmarks. That’s why it did not get higher in the standings.
Squidix had a good speed in general (1.69 seconds full page load time). But it failed with its Satisfactory Apdex. So, not the best result after all.
Eleven2, like in previous months, did not satisfy the strict rules of passing the benchmarks. So it goes closer to the end of the list with its speed 1.78 seconds.
HawkHost was comparatively not very fast (1.85 seconds). And with failed Satisfactory Apdex benchmark it goes close to the end of the list.
GlowHost was not fast at all (2.62 sec). It’s not a surprise for this host to fail badly with speed. Its Satisfactory Apdex became even worse this month (54.98%). Of course, it did not meet the highest standards for great hosting. Only the last place (again and again) in this Contest.
Conclusion
Thus, the best hosts which have demonstrated amazing performance in August 2016 are the medalists: InMotionHosting, A2Hosting and VeeroTech. By the way, VeeroTech, unlike other winners, is from the most affordable pricing category!
As regards the winners in different pricing categories, here they are:
The best hosts in the higher pricing category ($8-10/mo) in August 2016 are in the following order InMotionHosting, A2Hosting and Squidix.
The best three hosts in the middle pricing category ($4-8/mo) in August 2016 are HostWinds, GeekStorage and SiteGround.
The best three hosts in the most affordable pricing category (up to $4/mo) in August 2016 are VeeroTech, MDDHosting and LunarPages (I’m using its cheapest plan without cPanel),
By the way, VeeroTech, although being in the most affordable pricing category, has won the bronze medal among all the hosts in this Contest! Impressive!
By the way, I’m using the cheapest plans available on each of the monitored hosts.
It’s interesting that some hosts from a lower pricing category outperformed hosts from a higher pricing category. A real hero is VeeroTech who managed to leave many more expensive hosts behind.
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.
Other monthly roundups of this Hosting Performance Contest are available here.
And my recommended hosts are here.
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.
