As many of you may already know, IvyCat recently partnered with SiteGround to handle all of our own and our clients’ hosting needs.
This decision was not made lightly. We knew we only wanted the best for our clients, and for IvyCat, too. We wanted to find someone we’d trust with our own business before we’d ever recommend them to anyone else.
We looked long and hard for what we believed to be the best in the hosting business. As always, customer service is IvyCat’s #1 priority and we weren’t willing to hand over our hosting clients to just anyone.
After weeks of meetings and evaluations, we came to the decision that SiteGround would take the best care of our valued customers.
Because of the extensive research we’d done, we have been 100% comfortable with our decision to move all hosting over to SiteGround. They have time-tested, proven, award-winning service and we knew our hosting needs were safe in their hands.
Putting It To the Test
Recently, the folks over at WP Site Care decided to test the performance of 12 of the top host providers.
Ryan Sullivan explains how the experiment worked:
To run the tests I used a load testing service called Load Impact. Load Impact fires up an Amazon server that you choose, and begins to send traffic to the site, increasing slowly over a certain amount of time.
For this particular test I sent 50 users to a testing site, increasing from one user to 50 concurrent users, over the span of 10 minutes. 50 concurrent users is a nice baseline test for a shared host. Once you hit that benchmark on a fairly consistent basis, it’s probably time to start exploring VPS and Managed WordPress hosting options. Traffic increases steadily throughout the timeframe until 50 users are visiting the site all at the same time.
Wise Decision
So what were the final results? We were not at all surprised to learn that SiteGround beat out the competition including some very big names like GoDaddy, BlueHost and DreamHost among others.
Sullivan states that:
SiteGround was one of our top performers, and is especially impressive considering the $3.95 price point for their StartUp hosting tier. It does have a limitation of one website at that price point, but considering the average response time was ~700ms all the way to 50 concurrent users with no real hiccups, SiteGround offers a great value.
The Results Speak for Themselves
Here are the data:
Testing Server Location: Dallas, TX
SiteGround Server Location: Chicago, IL
Max Response Time: 1.79 seconds
Minimum Response Time: 669.9 milliseconds
To learn more and review the entire experiment, head over to WPSiteCare’s post.
Best Overall Performance
Siteground won first place as the best overall performing hosting service. This is no small thing. As I mentioned, there were some very heavy hitters included in these tests.
Congratulations, SiteGround! The IvyCats could not be more proud.
If you’re in the market for a new hosting company, we continue to strongly recommend SiteGround as our go-to service provider.