GeekStorage WordPress Hosting Review

Disclaimer: Our reviews are not sponsored, as we used our own money to purchase hosting subscriptions. Our reviews are 100% based on our sole opinions. Reviews contain affiliate marketing links where we get a commission when you purchase or subscribe to that service. Read our Affiliate Marketing Policy here. Also, please verify all product and pricing information directly with the linked brands, as product offerings change often. FastestWP.Website is not responsible for errors or product discrepancies.

We proudly host our website on Rocket.net.

GeekStorage says they are “web hosting for Geeks, by Geeks.” They are a smaller WordPress provider, claiming to host only 20,000 websites. However, GeekStorage has been around for over ten years, and we found that GeekStorage offers many excellent features in line with other top-tier WordPress hosts.

In this review of GeekStorage’s WordPress hosting, we’ll detail our experience with GeekStorage’s Performance PX-1 WordPress plan. Note that GeekStorage also offers VPS, Reseller, and Dedicated Hosting. However, we are only focusing on shared WordPress hosting plans.

GeekStorage WordPress Hosting General Features

We were very impressed by the standard features GeekStorage provides for a smaller hosting company. We especially appreciated that GeekStorage included firewall and malware protection, SSL certificates, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Especially for the price of GeekStorage’s plans, we did not automatically assume that these “standard” features were standard.

We also appreciate that GeekStorage includes free email hosting. If you have a separate email plan through Google as part of Google Workspace, you don’t need to worry about email hosting – Google is your email host. But if you host your own email server, GeekStorage will host it for free, which is awesome.

Note that GeekStorage only has two options for its server location: Chicago (USA) and Germany (EU). Since GeekStorage does not offer a CDN, you want to choose the server location nearest to your customers. However, if you have customers on multiple continents – or in Asia, South America, India, or Africa – you’ll want to get your own CDN or consider another host that includes a CDN, such as WPX.

Finally, GeekStorage offers both monthly and annual plans. Depending on the service, GeekStorage may also offer two and three-year plans. However, buying a longer-duration plan doesn’t get you a cheaper monthly rate; it only locks in your upfront discounted rate for a longer period. If you like GeekStorage, buying a three-year plan is awesome. But if you aren’t sure or just don’t want to commit for that long of a period, note the renewal rates you’ll be paying once your contract expires.

GeekStorage WordPress Optimization Features

Regarding WordPress optimization features, we found GeekStorage very similar to KnownHost. For example, we enjoy that both companies use LiteSpeed server technology, as we have had excellent experience with LiteSpeed on other WordPress hosts. A big plus is that you get free credits when using the LiteSpeed cache plugin on WordPress. These credits can go towards image optimizations using QUIC.cloud or custom CSS creation.

And like KnownHost, GeekStorage doesn’t include a CDN on its WordPress plans. We are disappointed about this. Nonetheless, you can sign up for Cloudflare Basic on your own and then integrate it. It requires some work and configuration but will allow you to get a basic CDN service through Cloudflare for free. Note that Cloudflare Basic is not as good as Cloudflare Enterprise, included in Rocket.net and Kinsta WordPress plans.

Still, we appreciate GeekStorage including some upgraded optimizations not commonly found on lower-tier WordPress plans – but found on KnownHost – such as Brotli data compression and HTTP/3 support. If you add the Cloudflare Basic CDN for free on your own, use the LiteSpeed cache plugin to minify CSS and JavaScript, and then use free LiteSpeed credits to optimize your images, you can put together quite a powerful WordPress hosting plan on the cheap using the Entry plan as highlighted below.

GeekStorage “Unlimited” WordPress Managed Hosting Plans

GeekStorage’s three “Unlimited” WordPress Managed Hosting Plans are geared towards the beginner to mid-tier WordPress user. They are named the “Unlimited” plans because they offer unlimited SSD storage and unlimited bandwidth; two also offer unlimited websites.

Of these three “Unlimited” plans, we believe the top-level Business plan is the one to get. It provides twice as much RAM and CPU cores as the other two plans, plus twice as many processes and disk operations per second. This means you are getting twice the performance specifications of the other two plans, yet the Business plan is reasonably priced at less than $11/month.

But if you don’t want to splurge for the Business plan, the only difference between the Economy and Deluxe plans is the number of websites: Economy comes with three websites while Deluxe offers unlimited websites. Otherwise, the performance specifications of the two plans are identical, and you won’t have to worry about storage space as both plans come with unlimited SSD storage.

GeekStorage “Performance” WordPress Hosting Plans

GeekStorage also offers higher-level “Performance” hosting plans for WordPress. Although at first glance, it seems like the Performance plans are worse than the Unlimited plans, the difference lies in the details.

The Performance plans come with four to eight times higher disk operations per second than the Unlimited plans (512 or 1024 vs 4096 on all Performance plans). Disk speed is also 10MB/second for all Performance plans; only the Business Unlimited plan offers this speed. Finally, allocated RAM is higher on the Performance plans than Unlimited plans.

Having said this, one drawback of the Performance plans is that you only get 10GB, 20GB, or 40GB of SSD storage space. The Unlimited plans offer unlimited storage space. What you value more is up to you: speed or storage space.

There are only a couple of differences between the three performance plans. One is the amount of storage space, as we just mentioned. The second is that the PX-1 plan has only three websites, while PX-2 and PX-3 have unlimited websites. And the third is that the number of processes per second and RAM increase on each plan.

GeekStorage Performance Tests

As with all of our web hosting reviews, we tested GeekStorage using our test WordPress website to see how GeekStorage performs in real life. We ran all these tests using the WordPress PX-1 Hosting plan, the entry-level “Performance” WordPress hosting plan from GeekStorage.

Our performance tests have three components: Google Core Web Vitals, GTMetrix Performance, and worldwide speed testing. The results are below; our full test specifications are on this page.

Google Core Web Vitals – Lighthouse Scores

GeekStorage’s performance on the Google Core Web Vitals was not bad, with an overall performance score of 88. However, we expected better, considering we were testing the Performance PX-1 plan, which has more resources than the lower-level Unlimited WordPress plans. Furthermore, Knownhost – a direct competitor to GeekStorage – scored 92 on its overall performance score, which is more in line with other top-tier hosts.

The scores above are not the actual Lighthouse values but the ones Lighthouse assigns to each metric. We chose to display these scores instead of the actual values to make comparing scores across web host providers easier. Below is the chart showing the actual Lighthouse values for those who are more technically minded.

GTMetrix Performance

GeekStorage has two server locations – Chicago (USA) and Germany (EU) – and we chose Chicago as our host location. Therefore, we expected GeekStorage to perform well in North American locations while suffering outside of North America due to GeekStorage’s lack of a CDN. For the most part, our hypothesis turned out to be correct, although GeekStorage’s performance in North America was not as good as other hosting providers.

Hostinger and KnownHost – both competitors to GeekStorage in this price category – performed better than GeekStorage on GTMetrix testing. Furthermore, Hostinger has server locations worldwide, providing options to businesses outside North America or Europe. Thus, while GeekStorage’s performance wasn’t bad, we expected better, especially compared to its peers.

Worldwide Load Testing

Considering we hosted our website in Chicago and GeekStorage does not have a CDN, the load testing map looks exactly how we expected: excellent scores near Chicago and load times being progressively worse the further away you go. South Africa and Asia had especially terrible load times.

However, despite our website being hosted in the United States, Europe still had relatively decent scores. Scores in Ireland and London were about the same as in San Francisco! Remember that GeekStorage also offers a server location in Germany, so if you serve customers in Europe, you can choose Germany as your server base instead and get great scores across Europe.

Our GeekStorage Review Recommendation

GeekStorage is not bad overall. We appreciate all of the standard features GeekStorage comes with, including HTTP/3 support, firewall support, malware detection, and SSL certificates. We also love that GeekStorage uses LiteSpeed as its server technology, as we have excellent experiences with LiteSpeed on other WordPress hosting platforms. Furthermore, GeekStorage’s prices are very reasonable and ideal if you are price-sensitive or looking for a beginner plan.

However, GeekStorage’s performance on our real-world testing was not as good as we had expected. Furthermore, we had better real-world test results with Hostinger and KnownHost, which offer similar plans to GeekStorage. Thus, while we don’t want to disregard GeekStorage because we like its prices and standard features, we recommend you check out our reviews of Hostinger and KnownHost. And if you have customers in India or Asia, you will want to check out Hostinger, as it offers servers in India and Asia.

Finally, if you are looking for top-tier performance, we recommend reading our reviews of Rocket.net, GoDaddy, and WPX. We run our website on Rocket.net, and we love its performance!