Choosing WordPress Hosting for Performance
Your host matters far less than the stack it gives you. Two servers with identical specs perform nothing alike if one runs PHP 8.3 with an in-memory object cache and the other runs PHP 7.4 with none. This article covers what to buy, in the order I would buy it.
Two links on this page pay me a commission: WP Engine and Digital Ocean. Neither is my first recommendation in its category. The options I put ahead of them – Hetzner, Vultr, RunCloud and GridPane – pay me nothing.
If you are on shared hosting, nothing else on this page will help you much until you move.
Shared hosts cap your MySQL connections, often at 10, sometimes at 50. You also get no CPU or disk resource of your own, which causes two separate problems. Your speed varies at random depending on what other tenants on the box are doing, and worse, you cannot diagnose anything: when a page takes four seconds you have no way to tell whether that is your plugin or somebody else’s bulk import eating the disk.
Optimising a site on shared hosting is guesswork. You cannot measure a bottleneck reliably when a stranger’s workload is part of the measurement.
The best value: a control panel plus your own server
The combination I recommend to almost everyone is a control panel from a company that sells control panels, running on a server you rent yourself.
The reason is incentives. RunCloud and GridPane make their money from the panel, not from your hosting bill, so they gain nothing when you buy a bigger server. That leaves them free to tune their stacks for speed, and they do. A traditional host earns more when you upgrade, so a slow site is not entirely against their interests.
RunCloud or GridPane on top of a Hetzner or Vultr server gives you the best performance per pound of any setup I have tested.
RunCloud for site owners
If you run your own sites, RunCloud is the one to pick. The panel is straightforward, the stack is fast out of the box, and you are not paying for agency features you will never open.
- Running one site, or a handful of your own
- Wanting a fast stack without learning to build one
- Keeping the monthly cost down while retaining full server access
GridPane for agencies
If you manage sites for clients, GridPane is the better fit. Their stack is an evolution of the one I document in my own stack guides, with a control panel on top that makes building, configuring, cloning and migrating a matter of point and click. The multi-site and multi-client tooling is where it earns its keep.
- Managing sites on behalf of clients
- Needing staging clones and repeatable provisioning
- Wanting one panel across servers from several providers
Which server to put behind it
Once you have the panel, you choose where the server actually lives. In order of preference:
- Hetzner – the most compute for the money by a wide margin in Europe, and my first choice for any site whose visitors are there.
- Vultr – the wider network, one price everywhere, and the better buy outside Europe. See the costs below before you assume Hetzner is cheaper.
- Digital Ocean (affiliate link) – the most polished of the three and the easiest to learn on, but you pay for that.
All three give you a plain server with full control, which is exactly what RunCloud and GridPane want. My million-product demo store loads in sub-second uncached speeds on a $20-per-month Digital Ocean droplet, so this is not a setup that demands expensive hardware.
Where their servers actually are
Latency is the one part of page speed that no amount of tuning fixes, so pick the location closest to your visitors before you compare anything else.
Hetzner runs six locations: Falkenstein and Nuremberg in Germany, Helsinki in Finland, Ashburn in Virginia, Hillsboro in Oregon, and Singapore. That covers Europe densely and reaches both coasts of the United States, which surprises people who assume Hetzner is a Europe-only option.
Vultr runs 33 regions across North and South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Australia. Nine are in the United States alone: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Miami, New Jersey, Seattle and Silicon Valley. Another nine are European: Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Manchester, Milan, Paris, Stockholm and Warsaw. The breadth is what you are paying the premium for.
What they cost
Here is the part most hosting comparisons get wrong: Hetzner does not charge the same price everywhere, and the gap is wide. Take the same shared-AMD server, 4 GB of RAM and 80 GB of disk, and price it in each region:
| Region | Plan | vCPU | Included traffic | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki | CPX22 | 2 | 20 TB | €19.49 |
| Singapore | CPX22 | 2 | 1 TB | €26.49 |
| Hillsboro, Ashburn | CPX21 | 3 | 2 TB | €31.99 |
Add €0.50 a month for the IPv4 address, which Hetzner bills separately from the server.
Two things stand out, and the money is the smaller one.
The included traffic collapses outside Europe. European servers carry 20 TB on every tier. The same machine in Singapore includes 1 TB, and in the United States 2 TB. If you serve images or video and you host outside Europe, model your bandwidth before you commit, because that is where the bill will actually come from.
The United States runs a different, pricier line. Hetzner sells CPX11 to CPX51 there rather than the CPX12 to CPX62 range it sells in Europe, with different specs, and it costs meaningfully more per core.
Vultr’s shared-CPU range, from their public plans API, is the same price in every region:
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | NVMe | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| vc2-1c-1gb | 1 | 1 GB | 25 GB | $5 |
| vc2-1c-2gb | 1 | 2 GB | 55 GB | $10 |
| vc2-2c-4gb | 2 | 4 GB | 80 GB | $20 |
| vc2-4c-8gb | 4 | 8 GB | 160 GB | $40 |
| vc2-6c-16gb | 6 | 16 GB | 320 GB | $80 |
For a WordPress site of any consequence, start at 2 vCPU and 4 GB. One gigabyte is enough to boot, not enough to run PHP workers, MySQL and Redis at the same time under real traffic.
“Hetzner is always the cheapest” does not survive contact with their US price list. In Europe it wins comfortably, and the 20 TB traffic allowance makes it win by more than the headline suggests. In the United States it is a real comparison: €31.99 buys three cores and 4 GB from Hetzner, while $20 buys two cores and 4 GB from Vultr, in any of nine US cities rather than two.
Prices checked August 2026 and quoted excluding VAT, taken from the Hetzner console and the Vultr plans API. Your own bill depends on the VAT rate you are charged, and both providers change their pricing, so treat these as a sense of scale rather than a quote.
Hosting in Europe: Hetzner, comfortably. Hosting in the United States: compare Vultr against Hetzner properly rather than assuming, because the US pricing removes most of Hetzner’s advantage. Anywhere else, Australia, South America, most of Asia, the Middle East or Africa: Vultr, because Hetzner does not go there.
If you would rather not think about hosting
Some people do not want a control panel, a server, or a decision. That is a legitimate position, and for it I recommend WP Engine (affiliate link).
Be clear about the trade. WP Engine costs considerably more than a panel plus your own server for the same performance, and you give up root access. What you get back is genuinely good support: real WordPress people who will look at your site rather than reading you a script. For a business where an hour of your time is worth more than the price difference, that maths works.
- You want the lowest monthly cost
- You need root access or custom server software
- You are comfortable running a control panel yourself
What to look for in any stack
Whoever you end up with, these are the things that decide your speed. Ask before you buy.
- NVMe or SSD storage, never spinning HDD
- PHP 8.2 or newer. PHP 8 is dramatically faster than PHP 7, and unrecognisable next to the PHP 5.6 some ancient hosts still run
- MariaDB, Percona or MySQL 8, not MySQL 5.x
- Redis or Memcached in memory for your object cache
- Nginx or LiteSpeed, both of which scale better than Apache
- A page cache of some kind, ideally at server level
- An HTTP accelerator: Varnish, Nginx FastCGI cache, LiteSpeed, or Cloudflare in front
- A CDN, using its features to compress assets and set long browser-cache expiry
- HTTP/3, or at minimum HTTP/2
- Free SSL via Let’s Encrypt, renewed automatically
- Fail2ban at the firewall, which stops attacks before they consume any PHP or database resource
- Staging clones on demand, so you can test changes without touching live
The ability to clone your site to staging is worth more than it sounds. Finding a slow plugin means deactivating things one at a time, which you cannot do on a site with visitors on it.
Upgrading your current host
Moving hosts is work, so try this order first. Any one of these can be the whole problem.
- Upgrade PHP. This is the single biggest free win on an old stack.
- Add an object cache, Redis or Memcached.
- Upgrade the database to MySQL 8 or MariaDB.
- Add a CDN.
If your speed is acceptable after that, staying where you are is a perfectly good answer.
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