Best Hosting for 100K+ Monthly Uniques?

[jmrallen]

As you all know, doing a google search for "best web host for wordpress sites" just turns up a ton of reviews written to get affiliate fees. I'm looking for a real honest opinion here.

I've got a site running the latest version of Genesis and WordPress. I'm using a heavily customized News-Pro theme. My site can get anywhere from 15,000 unique visitors per month to 200,000 unique visitors per month depending on content and the news cycle. I'm currently using MediaTemple's Grid service and am seeing some slow site response times. I noticed MediaTemple just launched a WordPress-specific hosting package, but before I move to that I figured it was time to take a look at the whole landscape.

Synthesis seems like an option, as does WPEngine. The problem with those is price -- I sometimes get good traffic but don't generally make more than a couple hundred dollars per month. Naturally I don't want all my money to go to hosting. Any recommendations you all have for a great web host for my type of situation would be most appreciated. I just have one site, plus a hobby one, so a hosting package that offers 5 domains doesn't really matter that much. I'm just looking for host performance.

[ᴅᴀᴠɪᴅ]

I'm with WPEngine, but i have used synthesis before and they were really good. I only went with WPEngine as I have a handful of sites so it was better value, for one site Synthesis would probably be a better option as you get up to 2500 visitors per day.

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I love helping creative entrepreneurs build epic things with WP & Genesis.

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[jmrallen]

Thanks, David. That visitors per day thing is what's so frustrating. Some days I can actually see upwards of 10,000 visitors per day, where on others it's closer to 1,000. I don't want to sign-up for a hosting package that's more than I need on an ongoing basis, but I also don't want to sign-up for something that's going to gouge me with overages on those high-traffic days. Am I just at the point where I'll need to bite the bullet and buy the 'big boy' hosting package?

[Cheshire]

Congratulations on having such a successful website! 🙂

[Bill Murray]

@jmrallen - We do performance oriented managed WP hosting and we'd love to welcome you as a customer if it's a good fit for you. Our plan that's most relevant is $20/mo, and in almost all cases, there wouldn't be any overage charges.

Your post focuses on unique visitor counts, and while that's a very important metric, it's not one we (and perhaps most hosts) care much about. We're focused on bandwidth. Thus, assuming your site is a typical website, my statement on no overages would apply. If 100k unique visitors were watching 2 hour HD feature films hosted from our servers (which would gobble up the bandwidth), we might have to have a friendly chat 🙂

You'd find that our performance and support are strong. My forum signature contains a link to our site, and if it looks like it's of interest, just reach out via our contact form and we'll answer any questions you have.

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Web: https://wpperform.com or Twitter: @wpperform

We do managed WordPress hosting.

[jmrallen]

Thanks for the info, Bill. And thanks, Cheshire, for the congratulations. Yeah, I guess it's sort of a "first world" problem to have, huh? 🙂

I think I've got it down to one of four hosts: WP Engine, Synthesis, Pagely's Managed WordPress business plan and MediaTemple's new Premium WordPress hosting package. The first two are comparable (and high) in price, Pagely's about two-thirds the price, and Mediatemple is about one-third the price ($29/month). WPEngine and Synthesis seem relatively comparable, but the other two are unknown to me. Does anyone have experience with either of those, or have a hands-down recommendation for any of these four?

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