Liara or ArvanCloud or Ordinary Hosting? We Measured All

What each one sells

Liara lists hourly shared hosting, Iranian hosting, Linux hosting, WooCommerce hosting, download hosting, high-traffic hosting, Linux and Windows virtual servers, cloud databases and business email hosting. That is the same catalogue a traditional host offers, with one difference: billing runs by the hour rather than the year.

ArvanCloud is a different animal. Its products are cloud servers, a content delivery network, object storage, cloud containers, cloud databases, edge compute, DDoS protection and a web application firewall. Shared hosting is not sold there. Arrive with a WordPress site and no technical team and you will not find a product that fits unless you stand the server up yourself.

They now share one thing that is new: both sell access to AI models. Liara's catalogue names GPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Qwen, Grok, Perplexity and Mistral, and ArvanCloud runs a separate AI service. That is the 2026 shift in the Iranian hosting market and it did not exist two years ago.

The numbers we took ourselves

Three things in that table deserve explanation.

ArvanCloud returned three different IP addresses across three consecutive requests. That is anycast, exactly what a CDN company should be doing, and it is a good sign rather than an anomaly.

Parspack posted the fastest figure, but only because from outside Iran it answers from behind Cloudflare. We are measuring a Cloudflare edge rather than a Parspack server. That is a methodological warning, and any comparison that fails to state it has published a meaningless number.

And iranserver.com carries 3.14MB of raw HTML on its home page. For a company selling speed, that figure is a statement in itself.

What these numbers do not tell you

We measured from Helsinki and your customer connects from Tehran. For a service whose servers sit inside Iran, an external measurement is harsher than the Iranian user's reality; for one sitting behind a global network, it is more flattering.

In our earlier measurement of 38 Persian sites, median TTFB was 487ms for IP addresses registered in Iran and 153ms for those registered elsewhere. The same gap shows up here, and it is what makes any single-vantage-point comparison incomplete.

More important still: the TTFB of a company's home page says nothing about the quality of the service it sells. A good site and a bad service sit together comfortably.

Which one for whom

Running WordPress with no technical team? Look for shared or managed WordPress hosting, whether from Liara or a traditional host. We compared two of the traditional ones previously in our IranServer and Parspack comparison.

Traffic that spikes for a few days a month? Hourly billing genuinely changes the arithmetic, and that is Liara's real advantage.

Visitors inside Iran and a site that loads slowly? Establish first whether the problem is the server or the page. In our experience it is usually the page, and Iranian hosting is only part of the answer.

With a technical team and a wish to assemble the infrastructure yourself, ArvanCloud is the product class you are looking for. For everyone else, buying a cloud server means buying a job that somebody then has to do.

Method, so you can repeat it

Three consecutive requests to each domain from a Helsinki server with a browser user agent, uncompressed to measure raw HTML and compressed to measure wire bytes. Product lists were read from each provider's own home page and product menu. No prices appear here, because prices move and a figure without a date misleads.

To repeat this against your own provider, one curl with %{time_starttransfer} is enough. If the result worries you, compare what your current plan actually provides against what you need before migrating, because migration costs money and is not always the answer. A site built lean is fast even on cheaper hosting, and we account for that from the start when building one.

Measurements and catalogue reading both carried out on 19 August 2026. Search volumes come from clickstream data of the same month.