When it comes to website performance, Time to First Byte (TTFB) plays a crucial role in determining how fast your server responds to user requests. A lower TTFB means quicker page loads, better SEO rankings, and an overall improved user experience. But with so many cloud hosting providers available, how do you know which one delivers the best performance?
In this article, we’ve compared DigitalOcean, Vultr, Google Cloud, and Hetzner – four popular cloud hosting providers to see which offers the lowest TTFB for FlyWP users. Whether you’re a developer, agency, or eCommerce owner, understanding TTFB performance can help you choose the right server for speed and reliability. Let’s start by having a quick look at the definition of TTFB!
What TTFB Is and Why It Matters
What is TTFB? TTFB is a critical metric for web performance. Cloudflare describes TTFB as a metric that reports the duration between a client sending a request to a server and receiving the first byte of the response. Simply put, it’s how quickly a server can deliver its content after receiving a request. A lower TTFB means that a server is quite responsive and contributes to faster page loads.
Why TTFB Matters
Is TTFB important? Yes! Because it tells us how fast the server is responding to client requests, and by actively measuring its performance, we can accurately guess the first bottleneck a client might face.
TTFB plays a significant role in:
- User Experience: Higher responsiveness means quicker page load time and a better user experience.
- SEO Performance: Search engines like Google prefer faster websites compared to slower ones, and TTFB is one of the core metrics.
- Website Performance: A high TTFB means a server might not be up to par or there are some underlying issues or poor choice in hosting.
The Purpose of This Blog Post: Finding the Fastest TTFB Server
We aim to compare different servers to determine which one offers the best Time to First Byte (TTFB), providing FlyWP users with a valuable reference for optimizing their website performance.
While TTFB alone doesn’t paint the full picture of server performance, this comparison will highlight how different providers impact response times.
In this blog post, we’ll explore which hosting providers stand out in this key performance metric and help you make an informed choice.
Factors That Can Affect Time to First Byte
In this section, we’ll break down the key factors that impact TTFB and how they contribute to overall website performance. The key factors affecting TTFB performance are:
- Server Configuration
- Network latency
- DNS resolution time
- Content Delivery Network (CDN) usage
- Traffic Load
Each of these can affect TTFB performance in a different way. For example, network latency might affect users who are not close to the server region, while server configuration might not be fast enough to respond compared to others. During peak hours, website performance can decrease by a large factor if it’s not well optimized.
How We Measured TTFB: Methodology & Testing Approach
The following sections discuss how we tested TTFB for different servers in the FlyWP environment.
Criteria for Selecting Servers to Test
To ensure a fair testing environment, we are selecting multiple server providers within the same region for testing.
- With an average ping of 1-3 ms.
- Similar base configurations.
Tools and Techniques Used for Measuring TTFB
We will be using a curl that’s available in the Linux host system for testing. Curl is considered one of the best and most reliable tools available for testing websites. Due to its scripting capabilities and consistency, we prefer this over other tools like GTMetrix, Lighthouse, and WebPageTest.
Testing Environment Setup
To ensure consistent results, we maintained the following environment setup:
- All servers were provisioned using FlyWP
- A basic WordPress installation with no plugins along with a MySQL 8 Database.
- Each site will go through automated provisioning to ensure an identical environment.
- No caching or CDN will be used. This will help us measure the raw server performance.
- Each test will be run 10 times to make sure that performance remains consistent.
- Additionally, we will test the same servers with multiple PHP versions to see how they compare and if they have any effect on performance.
With this, we will be able to create a baseline performance without any of the complexities that other functions might bring to the table.
Best TTFB Servers: DigitalOcean vs. Vultr vs. Google Cloud vs. Hetzner
We have tested these server providers in these configurations:
- Google Cloud: e2-standard-2, 2 vCPUs, 8GB RAM
- DigitalOcean: General Purpose, Regular Intel, 2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM
- Vultr: High Frequency, 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM
- Hetzner: CCX13, 2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM
These configurations were selected to ensure a balanced comparison across different hosting providers while maintaining similar resource allocations where possible.
As Vultr didn’t have any similar configuration like the others, we chose the closest one in terms of CPU, as the services we will be running aren’t memory intensive. While this might seem somewhat unfair, increasing the CPU might give Vultr a better chance compared to other providers. But Spoiler alert: Vultr still beat the rest.
And the results were quite surprising.
Not only did Vultr outperform the competition, but it did so by a significant margin. The worst performer, however, was unexpected. Both Vultr and Hetzner coming quite close to each other was not all that surprising. They are quite competitive in the field as server providers.
Seeing Digital Ocean come in last was certainly surprising. Additionally, I expected Google Cloud to perform better, or at least close to Vultr or Hetzner, but this is much more disappointing.
PHP Versions and Its Effect
You may have noticed in the earlier graph that there’s a mention of PHP 8.3. Does that mean we tested other versions of PHP? Well, we did. Let’s see a combined view of all versions and providers, and then we will see how each performance differs by PHP version.
Here, we can see the fastest performance across versions. As we can see, in many of the cases, the latest version of PHP has better performance compared to the older versions. But this is only for the fastest response.
So what about the slowest result?
While the latest PHP version might be fast, the other versions are not that far off. It appears that other factors might be much more important than just the raw PHP version.
Additionally, in the median results, we get a much clearer picture of performance per PHP version. Here we can see how similar each server’s performances are across different PHP versions and can only be differentiated by the server providers.
Here are the version-specific graphs if you want to have a look at them.
TTFB Performance Graph for Different PHP Versions
TTFB performance graph for PHP 7.4: DigitalOcean vs. Vultr vs. Google Cloud vs. Hetzner:
TTFB performance graph for PHP 8.0: DigitalOcean vs. Vultr vs. Google Cloud vs. Hetzner:
TTFB performance graph for PHP 8.1: DigitalOcean vs. Vultr vs. Google Cloud vs. Hetzner:
TTFB performance graph for PHP 8.2: DigitalOcean vs. Vultr vs. Google Cloud vs. Hetzner:
TTFB performance graph for PHP 8.3: DigitalOcean vs. Vultr vs. Google Cloud vs. Hetzner:
How to Improve TTFB for Your Servers: 7 Best Practices
The most effective solution is upgrading to a better server or optimizing its configurations. In most cases, simply increasing basic server parameters like CPU and RAM can boost performance significantly.
Optimizing Server Configurations
- Choose VPS or cloud hosting over shared hosting, as shared hosting limits access to essential resources like CPU.
- Use a lightweight web server such as Nginx or LiteSpeed for better efficiency.
- Enable HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 for faster data transfer and improved loading times.
Leveraging CDNs and Caching
- Opt for a high-performance DNS provider like Cloudflare or Route53 DNS. While DNS might not be a proper indicator of site performance, using a slow provider might impact the first visit by a client.
- Select a server location closest to your target audience to reduce latency. Making sure your incoming clients are using the server closest to them will make sure they are getting better performance compared to a server located farther away.
- Implement caching mechanisms to speed up rendering and page loading. Caching will help load frequently visited pages faster and improve site performance by a large factor.
Choosing the Right Server Management Tool
- Select a server management tool like FlyWP, which offers built-in optimizations, caching, and monitoring to reduce TTFB efficiently.
Key Takeaways from Our Findings on the Best TTFB Servers
From our tests,
- Vultr and Hetzer provide better performance than others. However, due to the limited location available in Hetzner, the one we would recommend is Vultr.
- While DigitalOcean and Google Cloud were the worst performers on this test, due to their abundant amount of regions, they will probably be the first choice for many web developers.
Recommendations Based on Our Use Cases
If you want high performance and your clients want a provider with global reach, go for Vultr.
If your clients are in Europe, you will not go wrong with either Vultr or Hetzner, with Hetzner being much more cost-effective.
Additional Considerations:
- Scalability: Both Hetzner and Vultr offer very flexible Vertical scaling capabilities.
- Support and reliability: Vultr has very exceptional support, which is crucial for issue resolution.
TTFB is a crucial performance factor, but it’s not everything. DigitalOcean and Google Cloud may excel in other key metrics, such as overall reliability, network performance, or additional cloud features. So, choosing the right provider ultimately depends on your priorities beyond just TTFB.
Improve Your Website’s TTFB with FlyWP
While many might not feel that TTFB is an important factor on the grand scale of things, it still plays a crucial role in the current environment. Website speed determines whether or not a visitor will stay on a website. By combining a good hosting provider with CDNs, caching, and server optimizations, you can significantly enhance your site’s speed and user experience.
With FlyWP, you’ll get advanced features that help streamline server communication, reduce latency, and enhance overall speed, ensuring your site performs at its best:
- Optimized Server Configuration: FlyWP uses modern server environments, like Nginx and LiteSpeed, designed for WordPress to reduce TTFB.
- Redis & FastCGI Caching: Redis caching stores frequently accessed data in memory, and FastCGI caching speeds up dynamic content delivery, both reducing server load and speeding up response times.
- Cloudflare Integration: FlyWP integrates with the Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN) and ensures faster content delivery from edge locations worldwide, lowering TTFB.
- Automatic SSL Management: Automatic SSL certificates optimize secure connections, reducing the handshake time and speeding up secure requests.
- Optimized PHP & MySQL: PHP FastCGI Process Manager and MySQL tuning improve server efficiency and reduce database query delays, directly lowering TTFB.
Ready to improve your TTFB? Try FlyWP today and see the difference in your website’s speed and user satisfaction!
Add your first comment to this post