Every hosting recommendation on this site is grounded in test data published openly. I buy each plan with my own money, run the same benchmark stack against every host (WebPageTest, k6 load tests, UptimeRobot, SSH-verified CPU hardware), and publish the raw findings. The pages below are the data layer behind the reviews and rankings. No marketing claims, no industry-funded research, no sponsored studies.
Annual research reports
Year-over-year industry data with full methodology and per-host findings. These are the flagship reports the rest of the site references.
State of WordPress Hosting 2026
15 hosts tested between January and April 2026. TTFB from 28ms to 612ms, renewal pricing analyzed across 36-month horizons, CPU hardware verified via SSH on every plan. Includes use-case recommendations and the renewal pricing trap analysis.
Live benchmarks
Continuously updated performance data. These pages get re-tested as new hosts launch and existing hosts change infrastructure.
WordPress hosting benchmarks
TTFB, k6 load test results, and 12-month uptime data for the hosts I actively recommend. Methodology and raw numbers per host.
Hosting CPU rankings
PassMark scores for every host plan I've tested, verified via SSH lscpu. The hardware gap between a $3 shared plan and a $30 managed plan is wider than most buyers realize.
PassMark CPU score lookup
Reference table for the CPUs running on each host. Use it to compare what you're actually paying for against the score.
TTFB explained
What Time to First Byte means, how it's measured, what counts as good, and why your host's reported number rarely matches what real users see.
Core Web Vitals for hosting
The three metrics Google scores: LCP, INP, CLS. Which ones your host controls, which ones your theme controls, and how to tell the difference when something is slow.
Infrastructure fundamentals
The technical concepts that decide whether your site survives real traffic. These pages explain what each piece does and how to evaluate whether your host actually provides it.
CloudLinux and account isolation
What CloudLinux does, why it matters for shared hosting, and which hosts actually run it versus marketing the name without enforcing the limits.
Inode limits
The file-count cap most buyers never hear about until they hit it. How to check yours, how to free up inodes, and which hosts set the cap aggressively low.
LiteSpeed vs Apache vs Nginx
Why the web server choice matters for WordPress specifically, with measured TTFB differences from my own tests.
Managed vs unmanaged VPS
What "managed" actually buys you, and when the cheaper unmanaged option saves money without breaking your weekend.
Failover and redundancy
What happens when your host has a hardware failure, which providers have real failover, and which just promise uptime in marketing copy.
Redundancy explained
RAID, replicated storage, and why "99.9% uptime guarantees" mean different things on different infrastructure.
CPU investigations
The hardware most hosts don't talk about. What's actually running your site, why it matters, and how to verify the spec yourself.
Why cheap hosting uses old CPUs
The economics behind 2014-era Xeon chips still in production at $3/mo hosts. Includes the SSH lscpu walkthrough so you can check your own.
Why Bluehost is slow
The documented factors behind Bluehost's performance: TOS limits, inode cap, Apache stack, ownership history. Each point sourced to the document that establishes it.
Tools and calculators
Utilities I built for my own testing that turned out to be useful publicly.
Hosting cost calculator
Project your 36-month hosting cost including renewal price jumps. The math most buyers don't do until Year 2.
Test scripts
The k6 load test scripts, WebPageTest configs, and uptime monitoring setup I use. Reusable for your own testing.
Pricing and ownership investigations
The business side of hosting. Why prices keep rising, who owns which brand, and how renewal traps work.
Why hosting prices keep rising
Private equity rollups, infrastructure cost trends, and the providers that have stayed independent.
Who owns Bluehost (EIG / Newfold)
Ownership history of the major shared hosting brands and why the parent company decides what kind of support you get.
Hosting renewal pricing analysis
Renewal price increases across 14 hosts, with the source URL for each provider's published rate.
Hosts with stable pricing
The providers that don't play the renewal trap game, with their published renewal rates documented.
Methodology
How the testing actually works. I document this in detail because the methodology is the whole reason these numbers are worth more than industry-funded reports.
How we test
The 8-step process: purchase, deploy, monitor, load-test, renew, document. Every measurement on the site comes from this pipeline.