Hosting Performance Contest – October 2016 Roundup (15 Mashup)

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Here’s the ninth Monthly Hosting Performance Contest Roundup for October 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 general result can be described as the middle class wins!

By the way, you can find the latest roundups here and the performance tables and charts here.

All monitored hosts are presented in the pricing categories according to the most affordable plan they have. Also, I bought the most affordable plans available at each hosting company to test hosting performance.

Let’s see what results hosts has shown in October 2016!

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.

October 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).

• SiteGround (I recommend it, here’s my review)
• MDDHosting (I recommend it, here’s my review)
• GeekStorage (I recommend it, here’s my review)
• VeeroTech (I recommend it, here’s my review)
• StableHost (I recommend it, here’s my review)
• HawkHost (I recommend it, here’s my review)
• Squidix (I recommend it, here’s my review)
• A2Hosting
• InMotionHosting
• LunarPages
• HostWinds
• MochaHost
• 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 GeekStorage!.
In the Top-3 go also HostWinds and LunarPages.

What’s special about the leaders is that none of them are from the most expensive category. This month some hosts from a middle pricing category outperformed the most expensive ones!

Average full page load time of GeekStorage (the winner) was 1.34 seconds (it’s fast). Its Uptime was 99.99% (almost perfect) And its Satisfactory Apdex was 100% (i.e. 100% of time the full page load time was less than 2.5 seconds). Fantastic! All these parameters are above the benchmarks specified for the greatest performance. And since this hosting was the fastest host among the hosts which exceeded all the benchmarks determined for the greatest hosts GeekStorage wins the gold medal.

It’s worth mentioning that GeekStorage is absolutely not expensive, especially compared to some other hosts tested. And it wins all of the other hosts. Congrats!

The silver medal goes to HostWinds. A bit slower than the leader.

In October 2016 HostWinds was on average as fast as 1.48 seconds that is 0.14 seconds slower than the leader. HostWinds‘s uptime was perfect 100%. And its Satisfactory Apdex was also flawless 100% (i.e. 100% of all time full page load time of my website hosted with it was less than 2.5 seconds). Very good results!

The bronze medalist is LunarPages.

LunarPages performed in October 2016 as fast as 1.53 seconds which is pretty good. Its uptime was very high 99.97%. And the Satisfactory Apdex was 99.62% (99.62% of all time the speed was faster than 2.5 seconds, it’s above the highest standards set for great hosting).

A2Hosting took the 4th place with 1.62 seconds speed, good uptime (99.96%) and very strong Satisfactory Apdex (99.89%). The values are much above the highest standards set for the best hosts.

InMotionHosting took the 5th place. Its 1.69 seconds full page load time was a bit behind the above host. The uptime (99.99%) was very good. And its Satisfactory Apdex (99.72%) was also quite above the benchmark.

VeeroTech has taken the 6th place. It was quite fast (1.79 seconds full page load time). And its uptime (99.98%) was very good. Its Satisfactory Apdex (99.55%) was also much above the benchmark (99%).

Other hosts could not meet at least one of the benchmarks set for the best hosting, though the results of some hosts were very close to the benchmarks and overall pretty good.

SiteGround has taken the 7th place. From a speed point of view, it was faster than many other monitored hosts (1.58 seconds full page load time), and its uptime (99.99%) was almost perfect. But its Satisfactory Apdex (98.72%) was a little bit below the benchmark (99%).

MDDHosting goes to the 8th place. It’s another example of being unfortunate and lower in the rankings because of its Satisfactory Apdex. It was 98.72%, which is below the benchmark (99%). However, its speed (1.62) was not bad and its uptime was 99.92% which is good.

GreenGeeks took the 9th place. Although its average speed was not bad (1.72 seconds full page load time) it failed both benchmarks. Its uptime was 99.75% which is below the best standard (99.9%). And its Satisfactory Apdex was 98.34% which is also a bit below the highest standards (99%) set for great hosting.

MochaHost also failed both benchmarks and goes the 10th place. Its speed was 1.9 seconds, which is not bad. But its uptime was 99.89%, which is a little bit below the highest standards. Also, its Satisfactory Apdex (97.65%) was below the benchmark (99%).

Eleven2 goes got to the 11th place with both benchmarks failed, although it was not bad with average speed (1.95 secs). But its uptime (98.95%) was below the benchmark (99.9%). Its Satisfactory Apdex (95.93%) was also below the highest standards.

HawkHost took just the 12th place. Its average speed (2.18 seconds) was slower than the above hosts. And its Satisfactory Apdex (91.07%) did not meet the highest standards (99%). But its uptime (99.90%) was good and above the benchmark set for great hosts.

StableHost got the 13th place. Its average speed (2.19 secs) was slower than the above hosts. And although its uptime was good (99.94%) and above the benchmark (99.9%), its Satisfactory Apdex (74.83%) was not impressive and below the highest standards.

Squidix goes to the 14th place with its speed 2.22 seconds. But its uptime (99.97%) was very good and above the benchmark level (99.9%). What did not work very well for this host is its Satisfactory Apdex which was 88.31% (88.31% of time its Full page load time was below 2.5 seconds).

And finally, GlowHost is again on the last, 15th place. This host could not get higher because of its low speed. This month it showed good uptime (99.94%), but its speed was not good (2.85 seconds). And its Satisfactory Apdex (7.33%) is far from reaching the benchmark level (99%).

Generally, the competition this month revealed lower speed of almost all monitored hosts. Because of it more than a half of the monitored hosts did not meet Satisfactory Apdex benchmark level which is set to determine great hosting in regards of good speed stability. And it’s also interesting that more affordable hosts took the top places in this Contest.

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 October 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 October 2016:

October 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.

Three 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 October. Websites on the three 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 October 2016:

GeekStorage performed with great 99.99% uptime. It’s much above the highest standards (99.9%). My site hosted with this hosting was not available in October for 0.1% which equals 4.5 minutes.

HostWinds showed perfect uptime 100%. Simply no downtime this month.

LunarPages showed a good uptime 99.97%. And 0.03% (about 13.4 minutes) being unavailable. Good uptime.

A2Hosting had 99.96% uptime (and not available for about 17.9 minutes which is 0.04%). Good result.

InMotionHosting had almost perfect uptime 99.99%. It was not available 0.01% of the time which equals 4.5 minutes this month.

VeeroTech performed very well with 99.98% uptime (main site) and 100% uptime additional testing site. My main testing site hosted with this host was not available 0.02% (a bit less than 21.6 minutes) in October. it’s very good for the affordable host like this.

SiteGround performed great with 99.99% uptime. This month my site with this host was not available for about 4.5 minutes. Almost perfect!

MDDHosting performed well with 99.92% uptime. My site hosted with it was not available 0.08% of time (35.7 minutes) in October. Great for the affordable plan on this hosting I’m using.

GreenGeeks failed with its uptime. 99.75% uptime and 0.25% (about 1.86 hours) being down from a user point of view. Not very good.

MochaHost got almost satisfactory uptime (99.89%), but it failed the benchmark (99.9%). Accordingly, 0.11% of time being not available. From user point of view it was down for 49.1 minutes.

Eleven2 failed with its uptime. My website on this host was up 98.95%, which means no one could access my website on this hosting 1.05% of the time in this month (equals to 7.81 hours). That’s pretty much below the highest standards.

HawkHost was good with 99.9% uptime. It’s exactly the benchmark performance set for great hosting. My website with this hosting was not available for 44.6 minutes in this month.

StableHost had 99.94% uptime. It’s a good result which makes up 0.06% (26.8 minutes) when the site on this host was not available. Pretty much above the benchmark.

Squidix was very good with uptime this month (99.97%). The site on this hosting was not available 0.03% of the time in October (about 13.4 minutes). It’s strongly above the highest standards.

GlowHost passed uptime tests with 99.94%. It was not available for 0.06% of the time (26.8 minutes). It was good 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.

GeekStorage took revenge for the last months and won the gold in October thanks to its the best speed compared to other hosts and other metrics (uptime and Satisfactory Apdex) being above the benchmarks.

HostWinds was slower than the leader (1.48 sec) which made it the second with the silver medal. Very good!

LunarPages was also fast (1.53 seconds full page load time) which brought it the bronze medal. It’s a good result for the the budget plan I’m using with this host.

A2Hosting was breathing down the winners, but being a little bit slower (1.62 sec) put it behind the leaders.

InMotionHosting was also a bit behind the top performers. Good full page load time (1.69 sec), but not the best one.

VeeroTech satisfied all benchmark tests like the above hosts. But being a little bit slower (1.79 seconds full page load time) put it behind the better performing hosts. But still very good results for this affordable hosting.

SiteGround has lost its positions compared to the previous month. Although it was fast in October (1.58 seconds full page load time) it failed a bit with Satisfactory Apdex (98.72%). That’s why it got lower ranking this month.

For the same reason MDDHosting did get higher in this standings – lower Satisfactory Apdex (98.72%). But other metrics including speed (1.7 seconds) were pretty good.

GreenGeeks had a good speed in general (1.72 seconds full page load time), but my site with it was too often not available (99.75%) and its Satisfactory Apdex was low (98.34%). It made it behind many other hosts.

MochaHost had not bad speed (1.9 sec). But it failed in both uptime and Satisfactory Apdex benchmarks. That’s why it did not get higher in the standings.

Eleven2, like in previous months, did not satisfy the strict rules of passing the benchmarks. So, with its speed (1.95 seconds) it goes after faster hosts.

HawkHost was comparatively not very fast (2.18 seconds). And with failed Satisfactory Apdex benchmark it has not got higher in the standings.

The same story with StableHost. It performed okay from a speed point of view (2.19 sec). But some of the other hosts were faster and had Satisfactory Apdex better.

Squidix had comparatively not a good speed (2.22 seconds full page load time. And failed Satisfactory Apdex put it closer to the end in rankings.

GlowHost was the slowest in this Contest (2.85 sec). And as expected, it failed badly its Satisfactory Apdex (just 7.33%). So, only the last place.

Conclusion

Thus, the best hosts which have demonstrated the best performance in October 2016 are the medalists: GeekStorage, HostWinds and LunarPages. By the way, all the winners are pretty affordable hosting!

As regards the winners in different pricing categories, here they are:
The best hosts in the higher pricing category ($8-10/mo) in October 2016 go in the following order: A2Hosting, InMotionHosting and Squidix.

The best three hosts in the middle pricing category ($4-8/mo) in October 2016 are GeekStorage, HostWinds and SiteGround.

By the way, GeekStorage, although being an affordable hosting, has won the gold medal among all the hosts in this Contest! Impressive!

The best three hosts in the most affordable pricing category (up to $4/mo) in October 2016 are LunarPages (I’m using its cheapest plan without cPanel), VeeroTech and MDDHosting.

By the way, I’m using the cheapest plans available on each of the monitored hosts.

It’s interesting that some hosts from a middle and lower pricing category outperformed hosts from a higher pricing category. And the hero of this Contest is GeekStorage who managed to leave all other 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.

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