Host1plus, which based in London, is an international hosting company trusted by users worldwide. It provides various hosting services like shared hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated Server and reseller hosting, it also provides domain registration, SSL certificates. In this entry, I am presenting you a review of it's VPS service, which was made upon my personal test.

First, I am showing you my test environment, my VPS is the Gold plan which comes with 2GB menory, 2 CPU cores. I am running Cent OS 7 and Sentora for control panel.

Introduction

There are three kinds of VPS, unmanaged VPS, semi-managed VPS and managed VPS, what Host1Plus provide is unmanaged VPS. Unmanaged VPS is not like shared hosting or managed VPS, you have to install Apache, Mysql, PHP and other server environment by yourself, there is no control panel like CPanel or DirectAdmin, you have to install your own control panel or use command line commands to manage your VPS. It's a headache for bloggers who are not good at server management, Host1Plus also provides addons services to ease your pain, such as Extra-Care support, Cpanel, DirectAdmin, backups for extra cost, by the way, you can buy up to 32 IPs for every VPS.

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Loader is a free and cloud-based load testing tool that allows you to stress test your web apps and apis with thousands of concurrent connections. If you want to buy a high-performace web server, it is the right tool for you to take a testing before you buy.

It's very easy to use, but before testing, you have to sign up an account and verify your domain by uploading a file to your website root directory or modify DNS records. In case someone may use this tool illegally for DDos attack.

How to Use

I am walking you through briefly, If you want to take more advanced features, please take a look at its documents.

Test Settings

Here is a screenshot of starting a test, there are three test types for choose. 

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Like Media Temple's Managed WordPress hosting, Dreamhost has its own Managed WordPress hosting service called DreamPress. Recently, Dreamhost released an updated version, DreamPress 2, which cost only $19.95 per month for one WordPress installation. Compared to the previous DreamPress, the new version is mainly improved in performance.

SSDs equipped. Months ago, Dreamhost's shared hosting has truned to SSDs, now it is DreamPress, with SSDs, files are loaded much faster than regular HDD.

New PHP 5.5 with OpCache. PHP 5.5 with OPCache is simply faster and more compatible with 3rd party WordPress plugins. It's a brand new feautre to DreamPress.

HHVM support. HHVM is Facebook’s faster replacement for PHP. As of WordPress 3.9 and HHVM 2.0, the two work beautifully together. By default, It's not enabled, you are stilling use PHP. HHVM can be enabled in your control panel.

Varnish and Memcached Caching. Varnish sits in front of and is faster than Apache. Varnish improves latency and provides a layer of caching protection for your site during traffic spikes. While Memcached settings which results in faster load times, and fewer requests to the MySQL database. This means you can have more simultaneous visitors on your site.

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There are a lot of questions and answers about Media Temple WordPress hosting from its knowledge base, but those may not meet your demands. Here is a list of frequently asked questions and answers I collected during my testing of its Managed WordPress hosting, it may helped to you.

How Many Visitors Could Media Temple WordPress Hosting Handle

From the beta version to officially released version, there is no precise bandwidth or CPU resources limits set to Media Temple WordPress hosting solutions. I contacted the support team and got an answer to that question:

There are no individual resource or RAM limits for sites. The WordPress Hosting service is a shared service, so your sites share the resources of a network of servers with other customers. We personally will take no action (if you exceeded the 400,000 visitors limit of your Personal package in a month), but it is likely that you may encounter performance issues on the site.

In other words, for now, before Media Temple update their WordPress hosting packages limits, your sites can handle as many visitors as you can. If you have a WordPress site which have more than 1,000,000 visitors per month, Personal package is also suitable.Don’t worry about the limits, start produce more high quality contents for your visitors, as a managed service, Media Temple will solve all problems for you.

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I'm a long-time Media Temple customer, I purchased my first Grid Service hosting in 2009 after a lot of research I have done: reading reviews, talking to other Media Temple customers, etc. In the last 6 years, I am very happy with their hosting service and I will stay with them in the future. After been acquired by Godaddy, Media Temple has released several kinds of services for non-tech customers, such as Cloud Tech, Site Mover, Managed VPS hosting. Last year, Media Temple released Premium Managed WordPress hosting, after about one year in beta, the official version released about two months ago. Based on about one month of independently testing, here is my comprehensive reviews of Media Temple's Managed WordPress hosting.

In the beginning, I want to make it clear that I am trying to make this review short, I will focus on my personal experiences of managed WordPres hosting, If you want to find more information about their products, please check it on their website.

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