Onyx rated ‘Top Tier’ managed WordPress service

For several years now, popular review aggregation site Review Signal has conducted its WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmark tests. Its aim is to create a consistent industry standard for measuring which managed WordPress hosting services offer the best performance and value.

As a business founded on honesty and committed to investing in the very best service, we welcome these independent tests on our performance. Review Signal's core values are transparency and honesty, which align perfectly with Krystal’s characteristics of quality, value and transparency (hence the name!).

This year, we’re thrilled to share with you that Krystal’s very own ultra-fast and secure Managed WordPress solution, Onyx, has performed exceptionally well, once again achieving ‘Top Tier’ status.

A measure of excellence

Designed to help customers make an informed decision and push hosting companies to refine their services, the Review Signal WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmark tests assess two elements to determine overall quality:

1. Peak performance.
2. Consistency.

Peak performance is measured using load testing services that emulate high visitor numbers to see how well hosts respond to high-traffic conditions.

Consistency is measured using uptime monitoring to check how well the servers remain available over a longer time period.

The tested companies donate hosting plans for testing purposes on the condition that they are the exact same plans that a normal user would receive. All tests are performed on an identical WordPress dummy website.

To achieve Top Tier status in the benchmark test results, hosts must maintain at least 99.9% uptime throughout the entire testing and show ‘little to no degradation’ in performance during load testing.

For the purpose of the tests, we donated the Onyx Pro plan that comes in at £34.99 per month.

A new standard in managed WordPress hosting

Designed, developed and supported by Krystal, Onyx is our seriously fast, fully redundant 100% NVMe SSD platform, and sets a new standard in Managed WordPress Hosting.

The platform of choice for flexibility and performance, Onyx has a plan to suit everyone from individual blogger to businesses running a portfolio of high-traffic websites. Every plan has unlimited bandwidth, and as with all things Krystal, it’s built using best-in-class hardware and run on 100% renewable energy.

Blazing speed

One of the key measures of specialised WordPress hosting performance is the time taken to load a website page.

As part of the Review Signal benchmarks, WebPageTest.org assesses the speed of hosts by fully loading the dummy homepage and recording how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world. In 2020, Onyx did us proud, being the fastest host in both London at 0.371 seconds and Frankfurt at 0.391 seconds. This year, we’re thrilled to say we achieved a very respectable response time of just 0.615 seconds in London and 0.7 seconds in Frankfurt.

This is because Onyx has lightning-fast performance built in. High-performance 100% NVMe SSD (up to 10x faster than standard SSD) storage is provided for both web and database servers. LiteSpeed ADC stores cached copies of pages directly on edge load balancers to optimise response-times and deliver content to your visitors at blazing speed.

We couple this bleeding-edge technology with a specialised plugin within your WordPress install to allow you to make tweaks to the caching setup. This means the cache is also updated immediately whenever you make changes to your website.

Guaranteed uptime

Onyx is a fully managed, high-availability platform, so application-level high availability is provided as standard. This means that all plans come with a 99.99% uptime promise and money-back guarantee as well as over 2,000Gbps of DDoS protection. In 2020, Onyx managed to return a near perfect uptime of 100% and 99.998%. This year, we achieved an excellent uptime of 99.906% and 99.9302%. This is particularly gratifying for us, as it proves that our dedication to excellence is providing demonstrable value to you.

To achieve maximum possible uptime, we constantly monitor servers to ensure that your site is always available and online. We also monitor the resources your sites are using and scale containers to add more capacity as required. Multiple copies of your WordPress file data are stored on a globally-accessible NVMe-based storage cluster for optimal latency, allowing your data to be accessed from any host. This way, Onyx is not reliant on any single host node for data access; your site’s containers can run from any machine to address your storage.

Fully managed WordPress hosting to help you succeed

Onyx is a fully managed platform, which means we’re always here to help if you get stuck or have any questions. Our 24/7, UK-based expert WordPress support team can assist with anything from platform-related queries such as caching configuration to WordPress plugin recommendations.

We’d like to thank Review Signal for helping us maintain our reputation for both value and transparency. It’s great to see our hard work and investment pay off for our clients.

If you’d like to find out more about how Onyx can help you succeed, explore our flexible, scalable managed WordPress options at https://krystal.io/managed-wordpress or get in touch with us via our Live Chat today.