What is Reddit's opinion of Servebolt.com?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

If you're looking for cheap hosting, than Servebolt is not your cup of tea. But, if you're looking for faster than fast, great built-in scaling then keep reading :))

There's a yearly hosting review done completely independent and without bias called WP Hosting Benchmarks. In those reviews, Servebolt comes out on top and has done so for the last couple of years. You can read up on what they test, how they test and how Servebolt scored here: https://servebolt.com/articles/wp-hosting-benchmarks-awards-servebolt-only-top-tiers/

So sure, not the cheapest, but I'm also certain your bare metal option with whatever you add to it, won't be faster than Servebolt. Why? Because that's the type of clients we onboard constantly. Yes, I work at Servebolt.

We offer free testing for 60 days, so come check us out and see for yourself.

Well, WP Engine is not too good at WooCommerce (no cache-for-performance based hosts deliver good Woo performance). They'll cache some of your pages, but will serve misses for most of them - and produce a slow average experience.

You are most welcome Servebolt.com.

I did not write the article, but I'll pass on the kudos!

Your question is a bit off topic here with regards to the article contents, but will answer anyway :) Accelerated Domains will guaranteed do a lot of (significant) good to any membership/subscription site. Is there anything specific you see as a challenging problem? The feature deploy cycle on Accelerated Domains is quick, so if you have any specific needs, wants or concrete features in mind, just reply here, in a DM or use the public Servebolt support chat and your wish may very soon become true (if it's not supported and fixed already).

If you want super fast hosting, check out https://servebolt.com/platforms/wordpress/

This is managed hosting that just works super fast out of the box.

Your issues can be tied to either your code and database, or your stack. I would put my money on both.

Looks like you depend your performance on caching, which is a bad idea. Then the page will be fast if it's in the cache, and slow if it's not since your non-cached pagehits will hit PHP.
I have written in length about caching in WordPress here: https://servebolt.com/how-does-caching-work-in-wordpress/

The second is your stack. If you are using a low performance host then your performance will differ from time to time. I would suggest moving to a high performance hosting provider to ensure that you keep your loading times low at all times.

Then there is actually two more things that could mess up the tests:
- External resources
- Pingdom instability

If you use a lot, or just a few bad, external resources and they are implemented in a render blocking, non async, way, and they are slow to load, then your site will also become slow. Check the waterfall of your pingdom test to see if there is some resource that loads slow.

And, Pingdom handles a lot of tests. Aaaand, they mess it up sometimes. I personally don't trust Pingdom tests, and use them only to test from abroad etc. For performance testing I use other tools like sitebulb, or just the plain old Chrome inspector.

Nah, that's not right. WordPress can scale like anything out there, but you need to do things right. Build a scalable site and use hosting that is built to scale. There are so many sites out there that are doing crazy amounts of traffic and bursts of traffic (we host a ton of them on Servebolt.com) . It all boils down to using the right tools.

It's not necessarily high. If and when your site is properly indexed, you'll see a lot of attempts coming your way. Even more-so when you have comments turned on.

There's various ways to solve this problem and this is a great post outlining all the options you have.

Those thousands of xmlrpc requests can surely be a pain, but there are quite a few services that sites use that still use this interface. There are some other solutions to solving that issue though, here's an article that goes in depth on the topic: https://servebolt.com/articles/what-is-xmlrpc-and-how-you-can-stop-hackers-from-using-it-to-hurt-your-online-business/

Sounds like you're making your server queue responses, with a low on 366ms - which likely is one of the first requests, and then starting to queue at some point and ending at 5968ms. 50 requests per second is quite hefty though, that would for a general website equal something like 3000 active users online simultaneously on your site.

Check out this article for some math on estimation of traffic
https://servebolt.com/articles/calculate-how-many-simultaneous-website-visitors/

You could also make the Servebolt guys set up your site, and see how the same test scales there. They'll do a test setup for free.

I'm using Servebolt.com for all my sites and that includes a couple of WooCommerce sites. They're fully managed and the absolute fastest. They're servers are built for speed and scalability out of the box. You should check them out and test them. That's how I ended up with them after not being happy with the restraints Kinsta has.

I bring you an update about what I wrote to you last week. I did some tweaking on my sites, and while I was doing it, I did found this article:

https://servebolt.com/help/article/disallowed-and-non-recommended-plugins-for-wordpress-and-woocommerce/

For security plugins, I retired AIO WP Security (keeping the other two)

To hide the admin login page I exchanged WP Hide & Security Enhancer for another that is not listed on that page, Hide My WP Ghost Lite.

Still keeping the anti-malware because there isn't anything like it.

Take the article at servebolt with a pinch of salt anyway. I say this because to give you an example, I use WordPress Fastest Cache (only for page cache), which is listed as a bad plugin.

Still, WFC i's the one that gave me the best results, I've tried a bunch of others but that one is the one that worked for me.

Would recommend a VPS or a great managed hosting provider such as https://servebolt.com/

Depending on the project, I either host it on a VPS with Cyberpanel (OpenLiteSpeed) or Servebolt for critical, high volume ecommerce sites.

Walk-through of calculating concurrent users for a server https://servebolt.com/articles/calculate-how-many-simultaneous-website-visitors/

Dedicated server host. $330 / month 24core 64 gb ram https://www.knownhost.com/dedicated-servers.html

A couple of references I found quickly, both are updated info within the last couple years.

I'm short the article says finds that for their use case, a 32 core server could host 11,800 users per 10 minutes.(rounded for ease)

14(usage hours) * 60(minutes and hour) / 10 ( concurrent minutes) * 11800 ( users ) * 30 ( days in a month ) = 27,720,000 / 500,000,000 = .056 or 5% target performance.

If we then take that 5% and use it to get cost from the dedicated host it comes to $330 / .056 = $5,892 per month

Now these are pretty rough numbers. And at these numbers your host would likely offer special pricing for additional servers. ( Even something like digital ocean, or heroku)

Anyway hope this speculation helps.

If you have that much traffic, an update to PHP 7 is worth it more so than normal. For example, PHP 7 can handle far more requests per second than 5.6 and uses less memory

Source

I could argument against that for hours, and I actually have made this article into a talk. Which I did at WordCamp Porto 2018 a few days ago.Slides: https://servebolt.com/caching-the-holy-grail-for-web-performance-or-is-it-slides-from-wordcamp-porto-2018/

The reason why I wrote this article, and also give the talk about caching and performance is that so many people have been tricked into thinking performance is the only thing you need to install to have a performant site. And that is not true in any way.

Caching is a scaling tool with a positive side-effect on performance. It does not help performance site-wide but from the 2nd page load until the cache expire, and therefore it should not be the main performance enhancement. Using caching will probably trick you to think that your site is fast, but when you performance test a site using a crawler the truth is shown.

Fixing your stack and code is a performance enhancement that works 100% every time, and caching was not invented to hide slow code.

Please, use caching. But not as the main performance enhancement.