Managed WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (opens in new tab)

People use Wordpress because by now there's a plug-in for everything; I contribute to a smallish blog about grant writing (http://blog.seliger.com) and do simple maintenance, and I use it because everyone else does and practically everything I've ever wanted to do has had a plug-in already written.

Joel Spolsky's "Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html is relevant here:

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release "lite" word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy.

Replace "word processors" with "blogging platforms" and the same basic thing is true today of Wordpress.

It seems like unless you're willing to pay for managed wp hosting (or fancy hardware), you can't expect more than 10 pageviews/s to be handled. This makes me sad.

This is what I think the main problem is. There are so many plugins and many (most?) are poorly written. Since most users don't know how to code beyond maybe some html/css, they just search for the functionality and install whatever matches. That can typically land you with a WP site running 10+ plugins, each with their own security / bug liabilities.

WP is fine by itself and there are lots of good plugins but like anything user managed, it gets blamed regardless of what's causing the problem.

* You don't start interacting with it via code or text files -- you administrate it through a series of web forms. * Customization is done through plug-ins rather than composing familiar framework abstractions * If when you do decide to look under the hood, it's not organized like any familiar back end from the last 10 years and will take you longer than usual to figure out * Oh, yeah, PHP

It's pretty hard to argue with its success for people who aren't webapp engineers, though. And even from the engineering standpoint, after I had spent 2-3 years working on projects that used it as a basis for a platform, I came to a grudging (if tepid) respect for it.

This is a great writeup and a real gem among a sea of junk hosting reviews out there, but I am having a hard time couching these results against my current service because blitz.io, and webpagetest.org results obviously vary to a HUGE degree depending the site / page tested and how it has been optimized.

My regular testing includes webpagetest.org and blitz.io as well, so I just need a little more of a frame of reference to decide whether or not I want to use one of those coupon codes and make a switch. Thanks!

http://getflywheel.com/