One of the concepts behind Kickassd was to create a web hosting service with the ability to host much higher traffic sites than your traditional shared hosting service. We have noticed a trend developing over the past year of people migrating their sites to VPS because of performance issues, stability issues, forced by their provider, or because of a recommendation. In many of these cases a VPS is not actually needed, and I wanted to show that here.
What I wanted to do today, is compare our most popular plan (Mid Kicker) to a Digital Ocean pre-installed WordPress Droplet, and see just how they compare in regards to performance and ability to handle traffic. Both our Mid kicker and the Droplet will run as is out of the box with the exception of adding the Super Cache plugin to the Droplet and Litespeed Cache plugin to the Mid Kicker.
Note: Had to install mod_rewrite on the Droplet.
About Our Load Testing
The load testing in this article is carried out with the latest version of Siege (at the time of writing this). Siege simulates real users that access the site as defined by the test parameters. In this case X amount of concurrent users access 10 different URLs with a random access time of 1 to 3 seconds.
VPS VS Shared Hosting Details
In The Blue Corner weighing in at 1024MB and 1 CPU is Digital Ocean! This VPS is running Apache 2.4, PHP 7, Mysql 5.7, and Ubuntu 16.04.
In The Red Corner weighing in at half the weight 512MB and 1 CPU is Mid Kicker! This shared hosting account is running Litespeed + Lscache, PHP 7, MariaDB, Zend OpCache, and runs on CloudLinux.
Droplet Test Results With No Load
You can download the full results in PDF here. The quick and short results are:
Droplet Load Test Results
Our test Droplet held up quite well, and did not start to show signs of drowning until 300 concurrent users. This is much greater performance than your traditional shared hosting could endure, so props to Digital Ocean for putting together a good 1 click install of WordPress. Here are the results from 300 concurrent users.
Transactions: 300337 hits
Availability: 99.88 %
Elapsed time: 599.15 secs
Data transferred: 4133.33 MB
Response time: 0.49 secs
Transaction rate: 501.27 trans/sec
Throughput: 6.90 MB/sec
Concurrency: 244.88
Successful transactions: 300339
Failed transactions: 361
Longest transaction: 51.69
Shortest transaction: 0.00
Kickassd Mid Kicker Results With No Load
You can download the full results in PDF here. The quick and short results are:
Kickassd Mid Kicker Load Results
I hit our Mid Kicker test site starting at 300 concurrent users and worked up until I hit 1800 concurrent users. At 1800 there was no decrease in performance and it was rock solid.
I am quite sure that I could have doubled that 1800 to 3600 and came out with the same result, but never made it that far as the machines used for load testing started have network issues at this level and I could not take it farther.
Note: For the chart below Price To Performance ratio is Max Concurrent Users / by price this gives you concurrent users per $. It has been multiplied by 1000 for better representation on the chart.
[chartsninja chartid=”4d3a3cfc8fc042c0b2f9e1e64610b915″]
Purpose And Conclusion
I wanted to somewhat dispel some of this growing idea that if you have a performance issue that jumping into a VPS will be the correct solution for you. I see across different communities where people are looking for help with their shared hosting or WordPress hosting. Almost every time there will be 1 or more people that will pipe up and say “just get a VPS”.
This is fine if you are into that, and comfortable as a systems administrator, but if you are not than this is not great advice. If you are having issues with performance or stability than first you need to find the cause as to why you are having these issues. It could be simply a bad plugin or bad configuration, or it could be your host.
Simply put, find the cause and than evaluate. If you find that it is your host that is the issue than simply find another host, but rarely do you need to upgrade to a VPS and incur all the additional costs for your site to be fast and stable.
Want to give our high performance Web Hosting a shot?
Great article!
Thanks Darren, glad you liked it! By the way what was your slackchat address again?