Vultr One-Click WordPress Review

If you want to host your own copy of WordPress but don’t want to go through all the trouble of setting it up, it might be worth your time to explore using “one-click” installs from some of the major cloud providers. In this article, we’re going to explore the Vultr One-Click WordPress install and see what it’s all about.

Ease of Installation

Before anything else you need to get a WordPress box spun up on Vultr. Overall, the experience was pretty easy:

1. Log in / sign up for Vultr
2. Click “Deploy new server”
3. Select your server type (we used “Cloud Compute”) and server location (Atlanta for us).
4. Click the “Application” tab and then select WordPress.
5. Select your server size (25GB SSD $5/month for this test)
6. Add your SSH key
7. Fill out your host name
8. Click “Deploy Now”

So obviously this isn’t a single click to install, but it is a lot easier than setting up and configuring a WordPress installation from scratch.

Whats included?

Aside from the obvious stuff (WordPress, MySQL, etc) which we’ll cover in the next section, what else is included with your One-Click Vultr WordPress installation?

• XHProf – XHProf is a tool for profiling PHP applications. This could be very helpful if you find your site getting real slow after installing a plugin or theme. It could help you determine the source of the slowness.
• PHPMyAdmin – The classic MySQL database administration tool for the web. If you haven’t used it before, its a great way to browse your database and make changes.
• Maldet – Maldet is a Linux malware detection tool that runs periodically on your system to see if it has been infected. This is disabled by default, but can easily be enabled with the directions included with your new server.
• Cockpit – Cockpit is a web based interface for your server. You can easily see how your server is configured, what resource usage looks like, and update packages all without even SSHing into your server.

What’s WordPress Running On?

The Vultr One-Click WordPress system that we decided to use had the following hardware and software:

• Hardware
  • 1 vCPU
  • 1GB RAM
  • 25GB SSD
  • 1TB Bandwidth
• Software
  • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
  • Nginx
  • PHP 7.2
  • MySQL 5.7

Overall the software is a pretty standard LEMP setup and the hardware is as performant as you would expect for $5 per month. It’s also worth noting that the installation script for this one click install might need some updating because it installs the previous version of WordPress.

Performance Out of the Box

So you’ve spun up your new Vultr One-Click WordPress server, but what sort of performance can you get out of it? Using Kernl’s WordPress Load Testing we can easily see the performance that this $5 per month server gives you.

For both this test and the cached test (next section) we attempted to have 200 concurrent users browse the WordPress site for 30 minutes. The traffic was generated from Digital Ocean’s NYC3 datacenter.

As you can see we get up to about 20 requests per second before the server starts returning failures. For a $5 machine this isn’t bad at all. 20 req/s over the course of 24 hours is ~1.7 million requests.

Initially response times are pretty good, but as resource contention on the server increases the average and median response times start to go up. Even when under full load, the pages returned in under 5 seconds. Not terrible, but you definitely aren’t winning friends with that sort of performance.

The response time distribution is mostly what you would expect after seeing the error rate and the average response time. 99% of requests return in under 5.5 seconds. In general you want to see your 99th and 100th percentiles be low, but given the duress the server was under this isn’t surprising at all.

Overall the system performed well and was configured well enough to handle a small-ish load test.

Performance with Caching

The test above is almost silly in that most people will definitely be using some form of caching on their WordPress site. For a more realistic test, I enabled W3 Total Cache on the WordPress installation. There wasn’t any Memcached or Redis installation available, so all cache settings were tuned to “Disk (enhanced)”.

As you can see the difference in performance with caching enabled is quite good. We didn’t see any errors at all for the duration of the test and the maximum concurrent requests per second peaked at 160. Over a 24 hour period, that would be 13.8 million requests.

The response time over the course of the test was also quite good. Initially it hovered around 35ms on average, but as resource contention on the server increased it leveled out at around 140ms. Not too bad for $5 and nearly zero configuration.

Finally we come to the response time distribution. You can see here that 50% of requests finished in under 100ms, 99% finished in under 700ms, and all requests finished by 1800ms. These are good numbers.

Final Thoughts

If you need to host a WordPress site and don’t want to much around with configuration, the Vultr One-Click WordPress service is pretty good. In the long-term you’ll still need to know a little about system administration to apply updates, but it is definitely a great place to start and gets you a lot of the way to a fully functioning WordPress site.