I have recently looking at changing hosting providers as client sites are getting bigger all the time. Even a small brochure site can get over 1 gig after a while and with emails, backs up and staging environments, a lot of reseller account I have are running out of space.

My webhosting requirements are the standard, Cpanel/ Litespeed hosting. I don't want anything custom. In 2023, you are better of going with a provider that works off a standard, battle hardened tech stack than anything custom.

Price is important but also performance. I already have reseller accounts with Hostxnow, Mechanics Web and Hosting Heroes. They are all fine. Its just the space fills up quickly.

I found that for £25 a month, you get 50 Cpanels and unlimited space with a company called Brixly. The run the same standard tech stack that I need. The most important thing is the Litespeed Enterprise.

With Litespeed Enterprise and the Litespeed cache, I can get a perfect PSI score. As long as. your website is static which most non ecommerce sites are, then it doesn't really matter who you host with as long as they have Litespeed.

With Litespeed, the server handles all the static requests and the database isn't touched. It just serves a cached version of the site. As the cache is so tightly integrated with the server, no other cache can compete. Anyone that thinks so, is mistaken. You can easily test this out by signing up to a Litespeed host and cloning your site.

Forget your Cloudways, WpEngine, Kinsta, Serve Bolt, etc, none of them can compete with a Litespeed host. I actually approached one of the above named companies to test. They couldn't beat the cached version of a test site I had given them to test. They insisted their hosting was faster as without a cache it was faster.

Static Sites

A static site like this one, runs fast on all Litespeed hosts and its the cache that does the work. The processor and database don't get touched much. Brixly, Hosting Heroes and Mechanics Web all got perfect 100 scores too on page speed insights.

So if you mainly run static sites then Brixly seems a no brainer as its the same speed as everyone else and per GB, its the best.

Dynamic Sites.

I don't have any dynamic sites to test so I did the next best thing. I used a benchmarking plugin. The one I chose is by meowapps.com. It's built in to the suite of plugins they provide.

The Empty Request Time

This term doesn’t exist, Meow Apps made it up! 🙂 But basically, each time you load your website, the WordPress admin, or run a request to perform an action (asynchronously or not), the whole WordPress framework will be loaded. Along with it, all the active plugins will be loaded as well and those might run processes (such as updating the database, running tasks, etc). And finally, after all this, your request will be considered and performed (even if it is just to display a Hello World page). Scary, right?

Therefore, listing the posts in your WordPress will take the Empty Request Time (this scary process explained above) + the time it takes to list the posts and to organize them on a page.

Your goal is to limit this time to the minimum. If it is more than 2,000 ms, that will cause issues (you will get timeouts very often). Ideally, it should be less than 500 ms.

https://meowapps.com/tutorial-faster-wordpress-optimize/

So measuring the empty request time will give a good indication of how fast your host will be without page thats totally cacheable, for example, if you have an ecommerce site.

Other things it measures are

The File Operation Time creates a temporary 10MB file each time it runs.

The SQL Request Time calculates the total number of posts. This process should be quick and have a similar duration to the Empty Request Time.

How does Brixly do?

This is just on the limit of what Meow Apps recommend. Its OK but not great. You can pay for a boost which doubled the resources on a cpanel. If you are running something that is database heavy then that would be worth while.

Hosting Heroes

Hostxnow

Mechanics Web

So Mechanics Web and Hostxnow have the fastest hardware. If you have a dynamic site, it would be best to use one of those.

Support

All the companies offer excellent support. I've never had any problems that they couldn't solve. Brixly has been excellent answering my questions really quickly. Nothing much more to say.

Conclusion

Brixly is great for hosting and I will be moving static client sites over there. I will keep my site on Hostxnow as they've been great and I like to spread site out.

Brixly

Hosting Heroes

Hostxnow

Mechanics Web

Thanks to webwhim for their articles which explain in great detail how to make a fast WordPress site. I recommend reading all their articles on the topic. Litespeed is the secret ingredient for a fast website. If your host doesn't use Litespeed Enterprise, it will be slower.

If you need help with WordPress Speed, check out my speed service.

Desktop Page Speed

Mobile Page Speed

Ben

Ben has a BEng (Hons) in Computer Science and 20 years of experience in online marketing, specialising in SEO, lead generation and affiliate marketing. After spending over a decade as an igaming affiliate, he has decided to concentrate on GA4 training and SEO Audits.