*Load test your own WordPress site with * *Kernl* *! Getting started is free!*
In the world of cloud computing there are a lot of different options to choose from. Normally you only need to choose how big your instance will be (2 vCPUs or 4, 2GB RAM or 6), but some cloud compute providers are upping their game and providing an even wider array of options and instance types for you to choose from
Vultr has 3 different types of compute instances:
Cloud Computeâ You get your own virtual server, but it is sharing hardware resources with lots of friends. Noisy neighbors can definitely be a problem. Dedicatedâ Dedicated servers, but virtualized. I (think) it is possible to run in to noisy neighbor problems in this situation. Bare Metalâ Dedicated servers and hardware. No hypervisor and no noisy neighbors taking up your resources
In this article weâÂÂre going to see how a
*very* basic WordPress install performs on the different types of Vultr compute instances. WeâÂÂll do so using KernlâÂÂs WordPress Load Testing service
The Test
As per usual with Kernl load tests I imported this blogâÂÂs content into each load testing environment. The load test skews
**extremely** read heavy. If you have a site that is write heavy or a mix you may see different results
Each test was performed for 1 hour with 2000 concurrent users generating load from London and New York to VultrâÂÂs data center in New Jersey
Configuration
For this test I used VultrâÂÂs pre-built WordPress image with no caching. A lot of readers might say âÂÂBut you can get much better performance using X or Y and they would be right! But IâÂÂm not testing Apache vs Nginx performance, or W3 Total Cache vs WP Rocket, IâÂÂm testing Vultr hardware under load in a real world scenario. I simply want to know at the end of this article if Vultr Cloud Compute, Dedicated, or Bare Metal is better for WordPress hosting
Test 1: Vultr Cloud Compute $10 / Month
The first test I performed was against the $10 per month Vultr Cloud Compute offering. As expected of a $10/month VPS performance wasnâÂÂt awesome, but it also wasnâÂÂt terrible
As you can see, lots of failed requests and only maintaining throughput of 16 req/s. Not unexpected with a single core and 1 GB of RAM. After all, I was throwing 2000 concurrent requests per second at the server. The response time distribution was similarly bad
Overall, the results for the $10 VPS were as expected. This isnâÂÂt really an apples to apples comparison (weâÂÂll get to that later), but I wanted to give you an idea of what basic VPS instance performance looks like
Test 2: Vultr Cloud Compute $80 / Month
With this test weâÂÂre starting to get closer to the cost of bare metal and dedicated instances. This server had 6 CPUs and 16GB of RAM. Considerably more robust than the $10 server
This graph tells a
*much* different story than the previous test. Performance peaked at 169 req/s and then leveled off at 100 req/s. We still saw a lot of errors, but once again this isnâÂÂt unexpected. Honestly if you started to get this much traffic you would likely start breaking up WordPress into its components (file system, PHP + Nginx, MySQL) and start scaling horizontally
The response time distribution was much better for this server as well. The upper end was just as bad as the cheaper box, but the 90% and below ranges were pretty solid for the amount of traffic that was being received
Test 3: Vultr Bare Metal $120 / Month
The Vultr Bare Metal server was the instance I was most excited about testing. IâÂÂve always had a soft spot for hardware and getting access to a bare metal server is pretty cool. For $120 per month (on sale, price will rise to $300/month eventually) you get 8 CPUs and 32GB of RAM. This is a pretty serious server
Lots of blue on this graph but also the expected amount of red. You can see that throwing 2 more non-virtual CPUs and 2X the RAM made a pretty big difference. We peaked at 200 req/s and then leveled out at 125 req/s. For reference that is 17.2 million requests per day
The lower end of the response time distribution was solid, but the upper end wasnâÂÂt great at all. With all of those errors it isnâÂÂt surprising that this is the case
Test 4: Vultr Dedicated $120 / Month
I honestly had a tough time figuring out why Vultr priced the bare metal and dedicated instances so close to each other. Dedicated is clearly inferior (far fewer CPUs and RAM) so why would anyone choose it? Anyway, letâÂÂs take a look at the graph
This test peaked at 100 req/s and then leveled off at around 70. I really would expect a lot better performance for this sort of money
Response time distribution was similar to the other boxes. With all the failures it tends to skew pretty hard in the wrong direction. IâÂÂm sure that there is a use case for these dedicated Vultr instances, but it definitely isnâÂÂt hosting a WordPress site
Conclusions
With all of this data it was pretty easy to graph which of these is the best value
Value was calculated by taking the cost per month and dividing it by the maximum number of requests. Based on the performance we saw above the Vultr Cloud Compute instances seem like your best value for WordPress hosting. For WordPress hosting it looks like Vultr Bare Metal and Dedicated instances arenâÂÂt a great choice. As mentioned above, there are likely use cases where they are a good choice though (maybe workloads that require very consistent performance)
As with all of these tests, your mileage may vary! I highly recommend that you run load tests on any new host that you use to get an idea of what sort of performance you can expect
*Load test your own WordPress site with * *Kernl* *! Getting started is free!*