Who is the fastest shared hosting provider? Is a DreamHost? Bluehost?
How about Namecheap? I took my decade of web hosting experience and made it my
mission to answer this question. To do this I needed a website to test, so I
made this very basic WordPress website with a single 1,500 word blog post. I
then installed the essential plugins that I always install on all of my
websites and finally took a snapshot of the WordPress installation and uploaded
it to each of the three hosting providers. Next I needed a consistent and
reliable way to measure site speed. Since Google prefers websites with response
times of less than 200 milliseconds, I figure I start testing with ByteCheck.com
which measures the time to first byte. For each web host, I perform the
ByteCheck test 10 times and when I average out the results you'll see that
Namecheap crushes the competition with a server response time of 211 milliseconds
leaving DreamHost and Bluehost in the dust. The next test I conducted was with a
little-known tool built right into the Google Chrome web browser. In Chrome I
went to View, Developer, Developer Tools, and then opened the Audits tab. Here I made
sure that mobile and simulated throttling was selected to smooth out
any network hiccups and deselected everything except Performance. Then I ran
the audit for each hosting provider ten times. I averaged out their performance
scores and again Namecheap came out in the lead. But at this point I knew I need
to go a little deeper than these high level scores, so I went over to Google's
PageSpeed Insights tool and ran a similar test, this time five runs for
each host. Here's where it gets interesting. In this test I look
specifically at the time to interactive metric and to my surprise DreamHost
came out on top with an average speed of 1.54 seconds, but not far
behind was Namecheap. At this point I knew I needed a more sophisticated tool
to consistently measure page speed. That's when I came across the open source
project called sitespeed.io. I installed their tool on a cloud server in New
Jersey and ran the test 100 times for each website, and the results really
surprised me. Again Namecheap beat everyone out of the gate; however, when you
consider the time it takes for the web page to fully load, the clear winner was
DreamHost with an average time of less than one second. So in other words, while
Namecheap consistently responds to requests the fastest it's actually
DreamHost who's able to deliver the entire web page first. But (and
this is a big but) a huge part of site speed is the distance from your visitors
to the server where your website lives. Realizing this I did a geographic IP
address lookup and found out that both Namecheap and DreamHost servers are
located in Los Angeles while Bluehost is over in Utah. To make this test as
comprehensive as possible I use Vultr, one of my favorite cloud service
providers, to quickly snapshot my test server in New Jersey and move it out to
the west coast. I ran the series of 100 tests again, this
time from San Francisco. Results in, Namecheap was the fastest across the
board with an impressive average server response time of just 88 milliseconds
and loading its pages at least twice as fast as DreamHost and Bluehost. But at
this point you might be wondering how DreamHost outperformed Namecheap when it
ran the same exact tests from the East Coast. To be honest, there are a lot of
other variables and unknowns here so I can only speculate that DreamHost has
somehow optimized long distance requests better than Namecheap. On the other hand,
Namecheap is certainly the clear winner otherwise. So knowing all this which
hosting provider should you choose? Well based on the results Bluehost is
definitely out of the question. Personally I've been a DreamHost
customer since 2013 and with Namecheap since 2015. Something that might help
your decision is how cheap Namecheap really is. Their cheapest shared hosting
plan is $2.88 a month while their cheapest unlimited shared
hosting plan is $4.88 a month. For an in-depth review of my
experience with Namecheap and DreamHost, check out the links to my
blog in the description below, and if you've already made up your mind about
which web host to go with, I also have invite links to the shared hosting plans
that I use down there too. Let me know if you guys have any questions about shared
hosting in the comments below and best of luck with your websites. For more
videos like this definitely consider subscribing to my channel and if you do
I'll see you in the next one.