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Thanks. That's actually more than enough to help me understand and compare. For completeness you may want to mention in your original review that you used a d

by nptime 13y ago

Thanks. That's actually more than enough to help me understand and compare. For completeness you may want to mention in your original review that you used a default wordpress install for the tests which is ~250-500kB downloaded and listed as "Bytes In" in a webpagetest.org result. Maybe you did and I missed it. I started my tests with a default install too, but found that the actual sites I deal with are in the 1-2MB range so I imported "dummy content" I found somewhere to get more representative data and test different stacks of my own creation. I decided to go with a $40/mo un-managed VPS 6 months ago partly because managed would have been hundreds of dollars more per month and partly because I wanted to learn how to do it myself. After approx 6mo of testing and optimizing various stacks with similar results to these managed hosts I have to say they represent a tremendous value. Configuration management, back ups, maintenance, security and disaster recovery of a high performance stack is a lot of work and I am not sure if I want to keep doing it. That said, I could probably start my own managed hosting company that would compete well at this point!

ohashi 13y ago
I mentioned it was the default install but maybe that wasn't clear enough. I changed them all to 2014 theme too to give some parity. Real sites get heavier and heavier. When I load tests later they were on more realistic sites with some popular plugins enabled and dummy content. It's hard to make a 'representative' site though. Each install I've worked with has it's own set of plugins and feature-creep, it's hard to benchmark something like that and say it scales across everything. It definitely is a lot of work managing your own sites and these managed providers certainly fit a niche. You wouldn't be the first to jump in and start offering it yourself. Pressable has a bunch of code shared on GitHub if you were serious about it too. If you ever are interested in writing about your experience optimizing WP, I was thinking of doing an article like that as well. Maybe you could do a guest post? kevin at reviewsignal is my email if you're interested.

by nptime 13y ago

ohashi 13y ago

I mentioned it was the default install but maybe that wasn't clear enough. I changed them all to 2014 theme too to give some parity. Real sites get heavier and heavier. When I load tests later they were on more realistic sites with some popular plugins enabled and dummy content. It's hard to make a 'representative' site though. Each install I've worked with has it's own set of plugins and feature-creep, it's hard to benchmark something like that and say it scales across everything. It definitely is a lot of work managing your own sites and these managed providers certainly fit a niche. You wouldn't be the first to jump in and start offering it yourself. Pressable has a bunch of code shared on GitHub if you were serious about it too. If you ever are interested in writing about your experience optimizing WP, I was thinking of doing an article like that as well. Maybe you could do a guest post? kevin at reviewsignal is my email if you're interested.