Fastest VPS out there for WP sites: A comparison / rough benchmark

đź’¬ General Discussion
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I’ve been going down a performance optimization rabbit hole the past few days, and I just want to report my findings.

Methodology: I have a WooCommerce site on Nginx, no cache, that I simply clone to different similar spec VPS servers via RunCloud, then I test TTFB in both my browser and via KeyCDN from different locations. It’s a very basic Woo site with a simple theme and very few plugins, pretty close to raw WooCommerce. All VPSes have 2 cores, 4gb ram, from DE/NL datacenter unless stated otherwise.

Hetzner Shared vCPU: basic CPX22. Performance across most of my pages is 450-700 ms.

Hetzner Dedicated vCPU: expensive CCX23 (4 core, 16gb ram), tried everything on this one: Redis object cache, high innodb_buffer_pool_size, 30 static PHP workers, php 8.4, disabled wp cron. Practically speaking the performance is a little bit better than the shared one with no optimizations, but on average it’s still around 400-500ms on most pages.

Vultr High Frequency: AI told me that with WP it’s all about the single-thread performance as PHP cannot benefit from multiple cores. The Vultr high frequency VPSes have a high CPU clock speed. I was very pleasantly surprised, around 300ms on most loads, significantly faster and snappier than the Hetzner ones.

This made me think I need max overclocked GhZ CPUs to test, I went ahead and got some Ryzen 9950X VPSes (apparently these have the highest single-core/thread benchmarks) from

  • Adnin Servers: around 400ms on most loads from the Kansas City datacenter (100+ms latency from my location), pretty decent, but considering it’s a small niche provider I don’t see the benefit over Vultr which is more established.
  • Takehost.biz: around 400-500ms from DE datacenter, pretty disappointing.

Thus I reached the conclusion it’s less about the single core CPU performance and more about the overall quality and tiering of the provider, so it seems to be better to gravitate to highly established providers.

Upcloud General Purpose VPS: I tested Upcloud.com which apparently have some proprietary MAXIIOPS technology. The speed is just nuts. We’re talking a completely uncached WooCommerce site loading at 200-250ms on most loads. I’ve seen as low as 150ms in my own browser, while KeyCDN shows as low as 86ms to Amsterdam and 250ms to NY:

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Note: This comparison doesn’t say anything about concurrent load / multiple connections which I haven’t tested as I don’t get that much traffic.

I should probably stop this and actually start doing something useful, but I will probably be back with more VPS tests.

Shoutout to Runcloud, it makes it so easy and fast to test all this, I can get a new VPS and site up and running in 10 minutes.

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The biggest issue with WordPress is the initial load after that cache takes over and is all good, anything that is under 500ms is irelevant if you ask me it does not matter much to the user…

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Yes, <500ms doesn’t matter very much in most cases, but it depends on your software. E.g. for my B2B plugin there are is a worry/concern that it might be “heavy” or “complex”, and I actually get quite a few questions about performance impact. So it’s nice to be able to prove the opposite. I need to use the VPS for the demos, which I can’t cache.

This is for sites that cannot be cached. For anyone reading, if your site is fully static, the solution is very simple: NGINX FastCGI cache preload + Cloudflare Edge Cache 1 month TTL → 20-40ms even on initial loads.

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It funny this people that ask for performance are wathing 8k videos withot issues and theya re worried about 500ms LOL!

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Interesting thread, congrats, I love seeing actual testing instead of just repeating what AI said on this subject. :slightly_smiling_face:

From my experience, CPU GHz is rarely the real bottleneck. Most performance issues I see come from bloated autoload metadata, tons of plugins installed one over another, just to squeeze one more feature out of the site. Throwing a 5GHz CPU at that won’t fix it at all. In case of PHP, single core perf matters per request, true. But when you add a bit of Ajax work or your site gets multiple visitors in the same period of time, multithreaded perf comes into the game.

The numbers you found for UpCloud are really impressive, but I have a feeling this is also coming from storage speed, not just CPU power.

Keep up experimenting, curious what you find next!

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Good points! Yes, for most WP sites it’s the number of plugins in my experience. Under 20 plugins works best, 30-40 is still acceptable, when you get to 50-80 plugins that’s the “wait 3 minutes for a page to load” area.

I think it’s exponential, not linear: You have 50 plugins calling a hook, then if you add just one more plugin that adds something to that hook, it affects all the others.

It seems like it, their “MAXIOPS” tech apparently does very high read/write speeds.

I’ll do some more tests. DigitalOcean also apparently has some Premium CPU Optmized line on newer tech, I want to give it a try. If you have any providers /VPS/Servers you are curious about, let me know and I will test.

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Yep, please test Digital Ocean with your magic benchmarks, to see if their higher pricing tier is worth it or not.

Thanks!

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I tested it now with a few Digital Ocean droplets, 2CPU 4 RAM, Amsterdam datacenter.

  • Basic Droplet (Premium Intel) - $32/mo

Performance very similar to Hetzner, 400-600ms in my own browser in most tests.

  • CPU Optimized Droplet (Regular) - $42/month

This one is faster, comparable to but I think slightly slower than Vultr HF:

In my browser I get 300-400ms on most loads. KeyCDN shows:

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Of course, it is not a very scientific test and I’m sure it depends on what kind of app you are running.

My demo on Upcloud is now live: https://demobk3.wpbay.co/ - I’m really pleased with the speed,

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So yeah… DO not worth it :frowning:

Thanks.

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I have maximum 4 plugins installed, I can only imagine using 80 plugins the HORRRORRRRR!

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Like a fine wine, it should be paired with a GoDaddy hosting for the best experience :wink: (preferably the $5.99 per year plan)

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