Best Web Hosting Services for Performance & Speed

Deciding which web host to choose gets quite confusing when it comes to performance specifications. However, the characteristics of your site's server(s) characteristics are of utmost importance since they ensure a swift and seamless experience for end users. A good web hosting performance makes the difference between the success and failure of your website overall.

What Makes the Best Web Host for Performance?

In our research, web hosting performance is measured and qualified through uptime, CPU, RAM, storage, bandwidth, and the nature of hosting types. Sounds like a foreign language? In short, we made sure who offered the most speed, storage, and reliability related to each provider's pricing.

The importance of each attribute is rated as a percentage and contributes to the overall performance score.

Let’s break some terms down.

CPU

The CPU (central processing unit) is the control center that runs the server’s operating system and apps. It can consist of several “cores.” Each of those cores is lightning-fast but handles a single task at a given time.

CPUs can connect several cores in a network as servers require high capacities to assure a fast web hosting service. Most websites don’t have the workload for that many cores. Therefore, web hosts share server resources and mainly offer 1, 2, 4, and 8 cores. When ranking providers for performance, we looked at who offered the best CPUs and took this information into account when providers were directly competing with each other.

RAM

RAM is the short-term memory, where data is stored as the CPU needs it.

Higher RAM means better speed and performance because it is linked directly to the CPU. Thereby, it takes very little time for the cores to access and process data.

Though adding more RAM doesn’t make the server and website super fast, other binding factors like the speed of the networks and CPU make a lot of it, too. For the geeks out there, in our ranking, we measured RAM in GB divided by entry unit price times 50 and limited the top score to 10. The RAM weighs 20% on the web hosting performance score.

Storage

Storage defines the available space on a server to store your website's content (text, images, code, databases, etc.). Some files, like videos, occupy more space than others, such as text. Thus storage requirement boils down to the amount of data you will keep on a server. Your web page size should be as small as possible for quicker loading times and a better user experience. We calculate the storage score in GB per unit price. We multiply this value by 2 to measure it on a scale of 10.

Further, we differentiated between storage types as they also make up for a large part of the performance. SSDs and higher received a significant bonus as opposed to HDD use. The total storage score weighs 20% of the performance score.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth indicates the amount of data your website can transfer to users in a given time, usually within a month. It may be one of the two types: metered and unmetered.

Metered bandwidth puts a monthly limit on how much traffic your site can handle. If you exceed those boundaries, the site might crash and becomes unavailable for visitors.

The unmetered bandwidth is only restricted by the server’s capacity included in the pricing plan. It is the most common model for web hosting services, so you have nothing to worry about. With 20% weight on the performance score, we measured the bandwidth provided in GB per unit entry price and divided it by a factor of 10 to calculate it on a scale of 10.

Uptime

Uptime reflects the percentage of time that your servers are up and running (and so is your website). 100% uptime is impossible because all servers need maintenance and updates from time to time. While this is not a specifically weighted item, we also look at uptime and evaluate it when vendors are close to each other in the ranking.

Most hosts guarantee an uptime between 99.90% and 99.99%. This percentage difference looks insignificant, equating to nine hours of downtime per year. However, 99.99% amounts to less than an hour of downtime per year. Since these 8 hours can make a difference for larger companies, we also take them into account. Providers that are below the 99.9% are of course rated negatively.

Now that you know the significant areas of web hosting performance that directly affect your website and how we incorporated them into our ranking, let’s clarify why you want a fast web hosting service.

Research conducted by Think with Google gives a sufficient reason why your website loading times should be under 1 second:

Hosting Type

The hosting type also has a significant impact on the performance of websites. Simply put, compared to Cloud Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Hosting, you are sharing server resources of all kinds with others when you use Shared Hosting. It makes your website less reliable and optimized for speed than all other hosting types. While there are also differences between the different hosting types, we have decided not to take this further as it’s less relevant when looking at our scores combined. That said, Cloud Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Hosting each receive a bonus in our performance score, which reflects 20% of the weight.

10 Best Web Hosting Services for Performance & Speed

How to Choose a Fast Web Hosting Service

The type of your website and expected traffic will have a great impact on the best web hosting platform in terms of speed and performance for you. The hardware used by the servers and which resources a web host offers play a significant role to match that. This is also the reason why we don't do benchmark speed tests, because every website is different and reaches people in different places around the world.

Focusing on the hosting providers that put together their pricing plans with optimal features for performance gives you the best foundation for a fast website. In addition to these features, look at what else is important to you and cross out those providers that fall off the grid, leaving only one left.

If you want to dive into more details, try our Comparison Tool to compare providers side by side.

If you feel like you need more help choosing a fast web hosting platform that meets your business needs, try our web hosting Finder Tool.