PHP performance and server hardware

When you use PHP Vitals to speed-test your web hosting, you get a much closer look at the hardware under your websites than you’ve had before. Hardware is “out of sight, out of mind” for a lot of web developers, which means that it’s been easy to miss out on innovations, like NVMe storage, that have made a huge difference to performance.

Some hosting companies take advantage of this by continuing to sell hosting on old metal. Even AWS, which you might expect to constantly invest in the latest and greatest hardware, offers EC2 instances (which are a lot like a VPS) running chips from 2019, or older.

You wouldn’t buy a six-year old phone. So why would you pay to run your websites on a six-year old processor?

Example 1: NVMe storage and latency

When you sign up for hosting on old hardware, you miss out on innovations that make a massive difference in performance.

For one example, take NVMe storage. Non-Volatile Memory Host Express, to give NVMe its full name, changed the interface between the solid-state drives (SSDs) that hold data and the rest of the machine. Mainstream adoption of NVMe in the hosting industry began around 2020.

To understand what makes NVMe so amazing, consider the part that latency plays in server performance. Latency is basically waiting time. You send some data to be written to disk, then you wait for it to reach its destination, then you wait while the disk writes that data to storage, and then you’re done. The time between you sending the data and the disk finishing its writing is latency. There’s a similar story in reverse when you request (or read) data.

Just by changing the way data moves in and out of storage, NVMe cut latency to around 10% of what it had been for solid state drives (SSDs) before. This is a massive gain, and it all comes down to whether your host offers NVMe storage or not. If you’re on a server that was configured last century, you can probably bet that there’s no NVMe drive involved. On anything newer than that, you still want to check what you’re getting.

When you are reading about Web Hosting packages, “SSD storage” refers to the disk itself, and “NVMe” refers to the way that disc communicates. So you might see “NVMe storage” or “NVMe SSD storage” (which are the same thing), or just “SSD storage”. This last one is unlikely to be NVMe, and so nowhere near as fast. Remember that you can always ask providers exactly what you’ll get before you sign up.

Example 2: Progress in CPUs

When it comes to CPUs, also known as chips or processors, there’s no clear-cut historical moment like the introduction of NVMe. There’s also no tell-tale description or model to look for. Instead there’s been relentless progress. You’ve probably heard of Moore’s Law, which has more or less held for decades now. Chips just keep getting faster. This is why 1 core from 2010 is not equal to one from 2024!

Real-world advances haven’t been completely smooth, but there’s no doubt that the average CPU in 2025 is much faster than the average from 2020. Benchmarking data proves it. Scroll down the ranks of single-threaded server chips on CPU Benchmarks and watch the model numbers rewind through time as performance slows down. (We’ve gone with single-threaded performance here because that’s what matter for PHP.)

If you’re shopping for Web Hosting, the obvious advice is to look for providers that offer newer and faster CPUs. Unfortunately it’s very unusual for hosts to specify exactly what chips they run for each product. There can be good reasons for this, so it’s almost always a matter of asking for information. This is not the most helpful, which is why we created PHP Vitals.

If you are analysing and tuning website performance, bear in mind that CPU performance changes fast. It’s possible that just by upgrading from a two or three-year old model to something brand new, you could access twice the CPU speed. When it comes to optimisation, that is a huge gain for a relatively small amount of effort and, potentially, money. Sometimes the maths is simple: hours and hours of troubleshooting and optimising code for uncertain return, or upgrading your hosting for definite acceleration.

Just make sure you know what you’re moving to. If you can see PHP Vitals scores for both options, you’ll be even more informed.