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WordPress Hosting Survey Archives 2014-2024: Huge Hosting Surveys Summarized in One Place

What you’re about to read are the results of eight of our WordPress hosting surveys – from 2014 to 2024 – aka.  “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of WordPress Hosting.” 

Yep, we have good, we have bad, and we indeed do have ugly. The more we do these, the more interesting things get and the more insights we discover!

Click on the links below to go to the exact survey that interests you the most.

As you can see, we’ve been targeting these surveys to two distinct groups of users – those who consider themselves pro users and casual users. The results are mighty different depending on which group we ask. Check them out:

WordPress Hosting Survey

👉 Click for 2024 WordPress hosting survey results 👈 NEWEST DATA
👉 Click for 2022 survey results
👉 Click for 2020 survey results
👉 Click for 2019 survey results
👉 Click for 2018 survey results
👉 Click for 2017 survey results
👉 Click for 2016 survey results
👉 Click for 2014 survey results

In search of a recommended WordPress host? Here’s a comparison of the top WordPress hosting providers in the market 🤩

2022 WordPress hosting survey results

 Audience: casual WordPress users. Number of respondents: 3,400+. 

The survey ran as a pop-up on three of our sites. Here are the questions that were asked:

  • Which web hosting company do you use?
  • How likely are you to recommend it?
  • Which hosting are you planning to switch to?
  • What do you value the most about your hosting?
  • How many websites do you manage with your host?
  • How much do you pay for hosting each month? ($ USD)

Note; you can download the raw data file of this survey at the bottom of this post.

🔥 GoDaddy takes the market…again (and again)

Did you expect it to be any other way?

Like really, did you?

Indeed, GoDaddy is the most popular host in this edition of our WordPress hosting survey for 2022 (it also topped the list in our 2020 edition…as well as our 2019 edition…as well as previous years).

GoDaddy’s lead had dipped in our 2020 survey, but it’s opened up again as GoDaddy is once again well ahead of its competition (or it could also be a change in our survey pool, of course).

There were some bigger changes further down the list, though, with Hostinger making a big jump in popularity and SiteGround and HostGator dropping a couple of places.

Hostinger has some of the cheapest hosting plans in existence, so this isn’t too surprising.

Similarly, SiteGround flirted with increasing their intro prices a couple of times over the past two years, so it’s no surprise that it would drop in terms of overall popularity.

Here are the top six hosts in terms of popularity in 2022:

GoDaddy is not a big name with advanced WordPress users, but it’s massively popular with WordPress users as a whole. GoDaddy has also been making a massive investment in the WordPress space, acquiring companies, sponsoring WordCamps, and launching new WordPress-focused hosting products.

Basically, it’s no surprise that GoDaddy regularly comes in at the top of this list.

With that being said, GoDaddy had the lowest rating of any popular host on our list, so it appears that being popular doesn’t automatically mean people are happy. 🤷‍♂️ More on ratings later.

As we mentioned, one interesting change in this year’s WordPress hosting survey was a big increase in Hostinger’s market share. This seems to mimic larger trends beyond our survey, as Hostinger has had an absolutely massive pop in Google Trends over the past year.

Looking at data from the past five years, Hostinger was at the bottom of Google Trends when compared to other popular hosts until jumping into the lead in 2021:

Google Trends for WordPress hosting survey excluding GoDaddy

* Note, the big spike at the beginning of 2022 corresponds to Google Trends making an “improvement to its data collection system,” so that’s why you see such a sudden shift when before it was a slow change.

Of course, you might have noticed one name missing from the previous screenshot – GoDaddy. When adding GoDaddy to the mix, you can see that Hostinger will still need more time to catch up to them:

Google Trends with GoDaddy included

One group of hosts that you might notice aren’t on the list are the more “premium” managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine, Kinsta, and so on.

While these hosts are big names in the managed WordPress hosting space, they still don’t come anywhere near the popularity of cheaper hosts.

For example, WP Engine received 21 entries, and Kinsta hosting received just 10. In comparison, GoDaddy got 377 entries and Bluehost got 286.

🏆 Who’s the top-rated WordPress hosting company of 2022?

Okay, let’s cut to the chase! Here are the top-rated WordPress hosting companies according to our 3,400+ survey respondents:

HostVotesRating
WP Engine219.21
InMotion248.40
SiteGround1048.10
HostGator1167.83
A2 Hosting227.76
Namecheap1037.63
DreamHost537.58
Hostinger1667.58
One.com237.56
Amazon427.56
Bluehost2867.46
1&1 Ionos866.62
GoDaddy3776.31

* This is only the top 15. You can get the full data file at the bottom of this post.

For the above table, we’ve only decided to feature the companies that got more than 20 entries. While this does make it harder for smaller companies to appear, it’s even harder to get a meaningful rating for hosts with just a few responses.

WP Engine leading the pack is no surprise – when you’re paying a premium price, you’d hope that you’re getting a premium product…and WP Engine doesn’t seem to be disappointing many customers. InMotion has also found themselves very high on the list – no. 2 rating-wise. However, both them and WP Engine have relatively few total votes.

On the other hand, SiteGround got roughly 5x the number of votes that WP Engine did, which still probably makes them a safer overall bet considering their similarly high score.

While Kinsta didn’t make our 20-response cutoff, Kinsta had a similarly high rating over its 10 responses (9.13).

However, even the cheaper hosts still seem to be generally well-liked. For example, DreamHost and Namecheap have some of the cheapest plans around ($2.59/mo and $1.58/mo respectively), but both still received mostly positive ratings.

Finally, it’s a bit interesting to see that GoDaddy is the most popular host…but also had the lowest rating of any host with more than 20 responses.

In fact, GoDaddy’s 6.31 rating was well below the overall 7.20 average rating for all submissions in our WordPress hosting survey. However, this low rating doesn’t seem to have had any effect on GoDaddy’s market share.

The US market is kind of predictable in terms of who’s going to be popular. I mean, all those Super Bowl ads have to account for something, right?

But what about the international markets? Is GoDaddy just as popular in, say, India as it is in the US? Let’s see:

As in our previous surveys, we collected responses from users all around the world.

This year was a bit more USA-heavy in responses than previous years. But even with that, only ~35.8% of respondents were in the USA (versus 22.4% of respondents in 2020).

Other popular countries were the United Kingdom (~9.8%), India (8.5%), Canada (6.1%), Nigeria (3.9%), Australia (3.7%), Pakistan (2.8%), and South Africa (2.1%).

One of the biggest drops in respondents was India – 22.2% of our respondents in 2020 were from India, so Indian participants making up just 8.5% of responses for the 2022 survey was notable.

The increase in US respondents and decrease in Indian respondents were definitely the biggest shifts in demographics this year.

The list above is by no means the full list, though. In total, we had responses from 154 different countries on every continent except Antarctica.

As you’d expect, hosting preferences differ by country, but maybe not as much as you’d expect. For example, GoDaddy is still the most popular host in most countries. But there are some outliers, such as 1&1 Ionos, getting double the number of responses as GoDaddy in the UK.

Here are the most popular hosts for each country, along with how this data compares to our previous surveys:

Most popular WordPress hosting companies by country
Country Most popular host in 2022 (% of votes) Most popular host in 2020 (% of votes) Most popular host in 2019 (% of votes)
USA 🇺🇸 GoDaddy (15.91%) Bluehost (20.66%) Bluehost (16.43%)
United Kingdom 🇬🇧 1&1 Ionos (9.01%) Bluehost (7.94%) SiteGround (6.69%)
India 🇮🇳 GoDaddy (19.03%) GoDaddy (15.32%) GoDaddy (19.94%)
Nigeria 🇳🇬 Namecheap (21.05%) Namecheap (11.09%) WhoGoHost (12.25%)
Canada 🇨🇦 GoDaddy (14.01%) Bluehost (14.71%) Bluehost (18.18%)
Australia 🇦🇺 GoDaddy (13.60%) GoDaddy (9.30%) Bluehost (10.71%)
non-US GoDaddy (8.38%) GoDaddy (9.12%) GoDaddy (9.69%)

One interesting outlier is that Hostinger was used by 18% of survey respondents from India (almost surpassing GoDaddy for first place) and 9% of respondents from Nigeria, whereas it only had a 1.3% market share in the USA and 0.9% in the UK. This suggests that a lot of Hostinger’s growth has come from lower-income countries, which makes sense given its ultra-low prices.

Anecdotally, we’ve noticed that Hostinger does a lot of marketing outside the USA and Europe. For example, they have a localized Vietnamese site and run a lot of retargeting ads in Vietnam.

Beyond the different market shares of hosts in different countries, another intriguing bit of data is the difference in ratings between countries.

For example, GoDaddy had just a 6.03 rating in the USA, which was below its overall 6.31 rating. In contrast, it had a 7.13 rating in India, which is well above its average rating.

You can actually see this trend play out in general, where respondents in the USA, UK, and Australia had overall ratings much lower than respondents from India and Nigeria:

Country% of RespondentsAvg. Rating
United States35.81%6.95
United Kingdom9.78%6.61
India8.49%7.46
Canada6.08%7.04
Nigeria3.91%7.81
Australia3.67%6.74

This is a slight departure from our previous surveys. In 2020, Indian respondents actually rated their hosts lower than the USA, UK, and Australia. But in 2022, it’s been completely flipped, and India is now noticeably higher than those other countries.

👍 People are generally happy with their hosting (but less happy than before)

The overall rating this year across all hosts and all responses was 7.20 out of 10.

This means that most people are still generally happy with their hosting provider. And that makes sense – if a person were unhappy, you’d think they would switch to a different host rather than sit around being unhappy.

With that being said, this year’s average rating is the lowest that it’s been in any of our surveys. It was 7.61 in 2020, 7.40 in 2019, and 7.70 in 2017.

Most of this average drop can be explained by a smaller percentage of people giving a perfect 10 rating. While a perfect 10 was still by far the most popular response, it was noticeably lower than in our previous WordPress hosting surveys.

In our 2022 survey, 29.33% of respondents gave their host a 10. Comparatively, this number was 34.37% in 2020 and 34.40% in 2019 (almost identical).

In contrast, the percentage of people rating 1-5 was higher than in previous years for each rating in that range.

So – people are still happy…but not as happy as in previous surveys.

Here’s the full breakdown of the percentage of people leaving each rating:

How happy people are with their hosting
Rating % of users
10 29.33%
9 12.25%
8 15.91%
7 10.60%
6 5.80%
5 10.35%
4 3.14%
3 2.74%
2 2.10%
1 3.10%

☯️ Is “WordPress” a host? The ambiguity continues

As has been a difficulty in previous surveys, we had hundreds of respondents tell us that they host their website(s) with “WordPress.”

Because of the ambiguity of naming in WordPress (most notably, WordPress.org vs WordPress.com), it’s tough to know what this actually means.

One potential meaning is that these people are using WordPress.com to host their sites, either via the free/cheap plans or the more full-featured Business or eCommerce plans.

Unlike our 2020 survey, we didn’t get any specific responses for WordPress.com this year, so it could be that all the WordPress.com users simply put “WordPress.”

On the other hand, it could also just be people trying to say that they’ve created their site with the WordPress software rather than a website builder like Wix or Squarespace (these website builders also generated a number of responses in our survey).

If we do interpret these responses as “WordPress.com,” it still does seem to make sense. That would make WordPress.com one of the most popular hosts, but still below giants like GoDaddy and Bluehost.

However, the ambiguity makes it tough to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Wouldn’t things be so much simpler if WordPress.com had a different name? Just throwing this out there… 🤷‍♂️

🏎️ Is speed essential for users?

If you’re a WordPress pro, the performance of your servers is probably one of the key components of your overall satisfaction. But is it the same for everyone else? Do people really care that much?

While we did have a direct question on what people valued about their hosting setups, we’ve decided to go a step further here and actually use our own performance test data for this analysis.

The following table reveals not whether people say that speed is important to them, but instead focuses on the correlation between user ratings and real speed test data:

HostRateSpeed av. US, EU (s)Uptime av. (%)
SiteGround8.100.6799.95
HostGator7.830.8899.94
Namecheap7.631.6199.96
DreamHost7.582.6299.91
Hostinger7.580.7499.52
Bluehost7.461.97100
1&1 Ionos6.621.1699.98
GoDaddy6.310.4299.90

Based on this specific chunk of data, there doesn’t seem to be any significant correlation.

However, it’s worth pointing out that the loading times we get on our setups aren’t necessarily what other users get.

Let’s take a broader look at what people value the most:

⭐ What people value about their hosts

This was an optional question in this year’s WordPress hosting survey, but it still got 580+ valid responses.

I think you can make a good guess what the no. 1 most valued thing is, but let’s see the table anyway:

What users value about their hosting
What % of users
Customer support 31.39%
Price 14.92%
Ease of use 14.07%
Performance 9.78%
Reliability 9.78%
Features 8.92%
Security 3.26%
It’s free 2.74%

First off, why do these numbers add up to more than 100%? That’s an excellent question, indeed. Our respondents often listed more than one thing when asked what they valued about their WordPress hosting. So out of all the answers we got, we extracted the individual categories of “things” and then put them into a large spreadsheet. The results are what you see above.

So yes, customer support quality takes the first spot!

Another thing we can look at here are the leading hosting companies for each of the most popular, top-valued “things.” In other words, which hosting company got the most votes for their customer support, ease of use, price, and reliability & performance. Here are the answers:

Top-rated hosting companies for customer support
Host People who value “support”
SiteGround 15
Bluehost 15
HostGator 12
Top-rated hosting companies for price
Host People who value “price”
Hostinger 11
Namecheap 7
Top-rated hosting companies for reliability and performance
Host People who value “reliability and performance”
Hostinger 9
Bluehost 9
SiteGround 7
Top-rated hosting companies for ease of use
Host People who value “ease of use”
Bluehost 10
GoDaddy 6

Granted, the numbers are not huge here, but it’s still an interesting tidbit of info to ponder.

♻️ Which hosts are people planning to switch to?

Most respondents in our WordPress hosting survey were happy with their current hosting. However, for those who intend to switch, we also inquired as to which hosting provider they would go for.

Here’s what they said:

Which hosting are you planning to switch to?
Host # of votes % of votes now % of votes in 2020
Bluehost 32 10.70% 11.39%
WordPress (?) 20 6.69% 7.20%
GoDaddy 20 6.69% 7.04%
Google (?) 17 5.69% 2.35%
SiteGround 14 4.68% 7.20%
Hostinger 9 3.01% 4.52%
HostGator 9 3.01% 4.19%

Most people who are planning to switch don’t have any specific host in mind. However, the list of destination hosts for people who already know where they’re going looks quite similar to the list in our 2020 survey (and previous surveys).

The list doesn’t really bring any surprises, either, as these hosts are also the most popular.

Bluehost does punch a little above its weight as a destination for people switching hosts, whereas GoDaddy punches a little below its weight. But in general, the hosts roughly match their popularity.

The last confounding variable is people who say they’re switching to “WordPress.” Unfortunately, we can’t say exactly what they mean here.

Are these people who want to move to WordPress.com? Are they unhappy with a website builder like Squarespace or Wix and looking to move to WordPress as a CMS? It’s hard to know for sure.

🖥️ How many sites do users host?

Most people – a huge plurality and almost a majority at 47.5% of respondents – only host one website.

This was pretty much identical to our 2020 WordPress hosting survey, so not much has changed in people’s habits.

Here’s how the data breaks down:

How many sites do you manage with your host?
# of sites # of votes % of votes
1 website 610 47.54%
2 websites 196 15.28%
3-5 websites 221 17.23%
6-10 websites 81 6.31%
10+ websites 175 13.64%

One interesting conclusion from this data is that it shows one part of how cheap shared hosts are able to get away with advertising “unlimited” websites – most people are only going to host a single site anyway.

One interesting thing is that people are more likely to host between three and five websites than they are to host two websites (something that was also true in our 2020 survey). I guess if you’re already creating a second site, it’s tempting to create a couple more, too.

These trends are not that surprising on their own. It’s expected that most people don’t have that many websites. However, let’s have a look at something a bit more interesting – how happy people are with their host vs how many sites they host:

In general, the more sites you host, the happier you are. As the number of websites hosted increased, the overall rating also increased across the board.

How many sites do you manage with your host?
# of sites User rating
1 website 6.64
2 websites 7.59
3-5 websites 7.64
6-10 websites 8.62
over 10 websites 8.68

This isn’t a fluke, either – we saw the exact same trend in our 2020 WordPress hosting survey data.

Logically, this makes sense. If you’re going to commit to hosting multiple sites with the same provider, you’re probably more likely to be happy with that provider than someone just hosting a single site.

You’re also probably more likely to have tested a few different providers before choosing one to host all of your sites, whereas someone with a single site might still be with their first hosting provider.

The prices people pay vs the number of sites they host

Another thing we must talk about in relation to how many sites people host on their setups is how much they pay for it.

With so many companies offering “unlimited” plans, we wanted to see if the cost does indeed grow with the number of sites hosted or if it plateaus at some point.

Here’s what we found:

Web hosting cost vs no. of sites hosted
“How many websites do you manage with your host?” Median cost per month
1 website $5.00
2 websites $8.95
3 – 5 websites $10.00
6 – 10 websites $15.00
over 10 websites $12.00

Something we’re not showing you in the table above are the average costs. Those were actually surprisingly high. For example, the average cost of hosting one website turned out to be $18.57 per month. What this means is that a handful of people are really overpaying for hosting. This raises the average value by $13.57 compared to the median.

Here’s a broader look at people’s hosting bills:

💰 How much people pay for WordPress hosting

 

Let’s not keep you waiting:

The median WordPress hosting bill is $9.00 per month.

This is an increase of exactly 50% compared to our previous survey. The median price back then was $6.

Why the increase? The reasons can be plenty. Starting from the fact that we’re not polling the exact same demographic of users every year. But also, many hosting companies have quietly raised their prices over the last few years. Those increases didn’t hit the introductory prices that much, but focused more on renewals. It’s an open secret that even though companies like Bluehost or SiteGround might welcome you for a very low price, renewing your setup for another term can be as much as 4-6x more costly.

Here’s a deeper look that compares the percentages of people who fall into a given pricing bracket:

Price bracketPercent of usersin 2020
$016.92%16.18%
$1 or less4.33%6.56%
$1.01 - $24.20%5.88%
$2.01 - $36.74%7.40%
$3.01 - $43.44%4.85%
$4.01 - $56.87%7.28%
$5.01 - $86.11%7.24%
$8.01 - $109.41%9.46%
$10.01 - $159.92%7.91%
$15.01 - $207.89%6.36%
$20.01 - $308.40%
$31 - $505.73%
$51 - $1005.98%
$101 - $2001.78%2.15%
$201 - $4991.53%1.87%
$500 +0.76%1.99%

Some takeaways:

  • The most popular bracket? $0. Nearly 17% of people who gave us an answer pay $0 for WordPress hosting.
  • The most popular paid bracket? $10.01-$15 per month at 9.92%.
  • More than 17% of people pay between $2 and $5 per month.

Some of the happiest users pay between $3.01-$4 for their hosting

This is an interesting piece of data to analyze. As it turns out, if you want to be really happy about your WordPress hosting experience, you should look for a host that costs between $3.01-$4/month. The average rating among users who pay this amount is 8.48.

Can you be even happier? Well, yes, there’s a tier above 8.48. But going that extra mile from 8.48 to 8.83 will cost you at least $500/month. Granted, however, we only got six respondents who said that they pay that amount.

Here’s the entire picture:

Price bracketRating
$07.19
$1 or less7.38
$1.01 - $27.76
$2.01 - $37.81
$3.01 - $48.48
$4.01 - $57.80
$5.01 - $87.77
$8.01 - $107.14
$10.01 - $157.54
$15.01 - $207.55
$20.01 - $307.47
$31 - $507.29
$51 - $1007.94
$101 - $2008.29
$201 - $4995.42
$500 +8.83

How much people pay vs the company they host with

We were curious how much people pay on average with each of the most popular hosting companies. Here’s what we found:

HostVotes that mention priceAvgMedian
Namecheap36$9.49$5.00
Hostinger54$14.19$6.00
1&1 Ionos14$12.04$6.50
HostGator34$45.19$10.00
Bluehost63$16.26$10.00
DreamHost17$16.76$14.00
GoDaddy47$47.82$15.00
Amazon6$159.67$15.00
SiteGround24$63.14$20.00
One.com4$54.25$33.50
InMotion8$43.04$35.00
A2 Hosting6$56.33$43.50

Takeaways:

  • Of the hosts that got at least 20 votes, Namecheap is the cheapest on our list – at $5/month.
  • Hostinger, even though it has one of the lowest entry prices, ends up costing their users around $6/month.
  • Most budget hosts like Bluehost, HostGator, DreamHost end up costing people much more than what’s advertised.

2020 WordPress hosting survey results

 Audience: casual WordPress users. Number of respondents: 8,900+ (the biggest one to date). 

Every year, this WordPress hosting survey ends up being the biggest such survey on the web, and 2020 is no different. The survey received 8,900+ responses, which is 2,400 more than last year! 👪👪👪👪

Apart from the analysis that we have for you here, we’re also making the raw CSV file available for download. Feel free to use it as a reference when making your own analysis. You can find it at the bottom of this post.

The survey ran as a pop-up on three of our sites. Here are the questions that were asked:

  • Which web hosting company do you use?
  • How likely are you to recommend it?
  • Which hosting are you planning to switch to?
  • What do you value the most about your hosting?
  • How many websites do you manage with your host?
  • How much do you pay for hosting each month? ($ USD)

🔥 GoDaddy takes the market…again

Did you expect it to be any other way?

Like really, did you?

Indeed, GoDaddy is the most popular host in this edition of our WordPress hosting survey for 2020 (it also topped the list in our 2019 edition, as well as previous years). With that being said, its lead is smaller than in previous years, and its overall share went down (as did many others in our top list, which suggests we had a more diversified pool of respondents this year).

Here’s the top five:

This is not a full list of hosts – just the most popular responses.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen

“People go with GoDaddy because GoDaddy is a well-known name brand that spends a TON of money on advertising. It’s all about brand recognition and marketing.”

– Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Full-time course instructor, LinkedIn Learning. Feminist. Talks ethics, web, philosophy. // mor10.com // @Twitter

GoDaddy is not a big name inside the WordPress hosting “bubble”. But guess what? Not only are WordPress users using GoDaddy … they’re actually fairly happy. While not the highest recommendation score in our WordPress hosting survey, GoDaddy clocked in at a respectable 7.36 average on our recommendation scale.

In the end, I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised at GoDaddy’s popularity. While it’s not on most “best WordPress hosting” lists, the company has been snapping up WordPress properties at a rapid pace. They’re also quite active at WordCamps, often sponsoring the events as one of the top-tier sponsors.

Interestingly, the popularity of the top five hosts in our survey reflects the overall market popularity quite well. Here’s a quick Google Trends comparison, which isn’t a perfect metric, yes, but still gives us a good overview of how popular these companies actually are compared to one another:

hosting trends vs this WordPress hosting survey

Right, GoDaddy seems to be missing there, let me fix this for you:

more hosting trends

On another note, considering HostGator and Bluehost are significantly bigger than SiteGround, it’s really impressive that SiteGround has still managed to get nearly as many entries.

One more intriguing takeaway is that the managed WordPress hosting space hasn’t been represented that much in this WordPress hosting survey.

In our previous surveys (the ones geared at pro WordPress users), companies like WP Engine and Kinsta had their fair share of votes. In this year’s survey, they got only 32 and 11 votes, respectively. This shows how different the WordPress hosting space is when talking to casual users vs people working with WordPress every day.

“GoDaddy is a fascinating case study on how to remake a brand. I think it’s fair to say the company’s branding nowadays inspires trust. A quick scroll through their website and you’ll find affordable, easy-to-understand hosting plans and lots of photos of friendly faces. They offer WordPress-specific plans for beginners who need hand-holding along with managed WordPress hosting options. Then you’ve got tools like GoDaddy Pro, support for WooCommerce, and resources for small businesses.

GoDaddy is also very active in the WordPress community, sponsoring many WordCamps and other events. They contribute to core and they’re a 2020 WordPress Community Global Sponsor. So when you take all that into account, it’s not hard to see why people use and trust GoDaddy. It might not be the best rated or valued web host, but it’s a recognisable brand, they’ve invested considerable time and resources in WordPress, and they make it really easy to set up a WordPress site.”

raelene morey

– Raelene Morey

Founder at Words by Birds. Co-founder at The Repository. Writer. Editor. Word nerd.

wordsbybirds.com // @Twitter

🏆 Who’s the top-rated WordPress hosting company of 2020?

Okay, let’s cut to the chase, here are the top-rated WordPress hosting companies according to our 8,900+ survey respondents:

* This is only the top 15. You can get the full data file at the bottom of this post.

For the above table, we’ve only decided to feature the companies that got more than 50 entries. We’re also giving the nod to SiteGround as Amazon AWS isn’t really a “host” in the true sense of what most WordPress users are looking for. That is, you need to be a developer to use it for WordPress, unless you’re using an in-between service like Cloudways. Still, Amazon AWS is technically the top-rated host if you take out that caveat.

If you’re a “WordPress person” you’re probably pretty happy to see SiteGround there at the top. This outcome is also very reassuring considering that we’ve been recommending SiteGround to our readers for a while now, so we’re happy they’re getting a great experience!

Apart from that, the big-name brands like Namecheap and Bluehost seem to be doing very well in the survey – both of them being in the top five.

Additionally, within the top ten, you can find all three of the hosts officially recommended by WordPress.org – SiteGround, DreamHost, and Bluehost.

Of course, our WordPress hosting survey wasn’t only about the big players. The respondents actually mentioned more than 2,000(!) different hosting companies.

🌎 WordPress hosting internationally

The US market is kind of predictable in terms of who’s going to be popular. I mean, all those Super Bowl ads have to account for something, right?

But what about the international markets? Is GoDaddy just as popular in, say, Australia as it is in the US? Let’s see:

Out of 8,900+ answers, only around 22.45% come from the US. Here are the top 10 countries and their most popular hosting companies:

Most popular WordPress hosting companies by country
Country Most popular host in 2020 (votes) Most popular host in 2019 (votes) Most popular host in 2017
USA 🇺🇸 Bluehost (20.66%) Bluehost (16.43%) GoDaddy
India 🇮🇳 GoDaddy (15.32%) GoDaddy (19.94%) GoDaddy
United Kingdom 🇬🇧 Bluehost (7.94%) SiteGround (6.69%) GoDaddy
Nigeria 🇳🇬 Namecheap (11.09%) WhoGoHost (12.25%) WhoGoHost
Pakistan 🇵🇰 000webhost (14.04%) GoDaddy (9.18%) GoDaddy
Canada 🇨🇦 Bluehost (14.71%) Bluehost (18.18%) GoDaddy
Australia 🇦🇺 GoDaddy (9.30%) Bluehost (10.71%) GoDaddy
South Africa 🇿🇦 Afrihost (21.98%) Afrihost (21.88%) Afrihost
non-US GoDaddy (9.12%) GoDaddy (9.69%)

Or, for a more interactive presentation (click on country):

Most hosts market internationally nowadays, and it’s fairly common for hosts to at least offer data centers in North America, Europe, the UK, and Asia.

While that’s true, most major hosts on our list are still headquartered in the US. This led us to wonder; are hosts managing to connect with international customers just as well as customers from the US?

First off, let’s talk about where our survey respondents come from and the overall satisfaction of those countries. Two countries dominated the list, with almost equal numbers of responses – the United States and India.

In the table below, you can see that users are generally equally satisfied with two big exceptions:

  1. Hosting customers in India are a little bit less satisfied with their hosts than the other countries.
  2. Hosting customers in Pakistan are a lot less satisfied than most other countries.
CountryCount% of RespondentsAvg. Rating
United States199922.43%7.88
India198422.27%7.37
United Kingdom5045.66%7.9
Nigeria4695.26%7.78
Pakistan4134.63%6.52
Canada2723.05%7.78
Australia2152.41%7.83

Of course, it’s important to remember that the websites where we ran our survey are all in English, so countries without lots of English speakers are going to be underrepresented in our results. There are plenty of, say, Chinese or German people hosting WordPress sites, they’re just less likely to encounter our survey.

One thing that might explain the low satisfaction of our Pakistani respondents is who they’re hosting with. The most popular host in Pakistan is 000WebHost, a free web hosting service from Hostinger. As we detailed in our post on free WordPress hosting, free hosting is not a great choice for serious projects, which is probably why Pakistani users are so unhappy with it (they gave it a dismal 5.24 rating). Excluding 000WebHost, people in Pakistan were otherwise pretty equally satisfied.

Beyond the overall ratings, we also thought it would be interesting to see how the most popular hosts fared at making their international customers happy. After all, to make the most popular list, a host definitely has to cater to a worldwide audience. But are some hosts doing this better than others?

HostNon-US VotesNon-US RatingUS VotesUS Rating
GoDaddy6307.342687.44
Bluehost4427.924138.13
HostGator2997.981427.77
SiteGround2958.351348.45
Hostinger3358287.14

There are a couple of interesting things in this chart. First, there’s the dynamic between GoDaddy and Bluehost in terms of raw popularity. Bluehost is much more popular than GoDaddy with USA customers and is about equally split between USA and non-USA. GoDaddy, on the other hand, is more than 2X more popular internationally than it is in the USA. In both situations, though, users are just about equally satisfied.

Another interesting note is Hostinger, which barely makes a blip in terms of USA popularity but is one of the most popular hosts with non-USA customers. What’s more, Hostinger’s international customers seem to be significantly more satisfied than those in the USA (though the sample size for the USA is too small to draw confident conclusions).

Overall, we can say that customers around the world all seem to be fairly evenly happy with their hosts…at least hosts that they’re paying money for. More on the free hosting conundrum later on.

👍 People are generally happy with their current hosting platform

The average rating given by the respondents was 7.6 / 10. This means that four of the top five most popular hosts in this WordPress hosting survey have scored above average ratings. In an odd twist of fate, the overall most popular host (GoDaddy) was the only one to fall below this average (at 7.36).

Interestingly, this overall score was a bit lower in our 2019 survey – at 7.4. Does this 0.2 increase mean that the WordPress hosting industry has upped its game? That I leave for you to decide. I wouldn’t jump to conclusions too soon – maybe our respondents were just in a better mood this year.

Another interesting note is that the most popular rating, by far, is a perfect ten. This makes sense – if most people didn’t love their hosting, they would probably have switched already, right?

For a more detailed breakdown, here’s the percentage of people who have rated their host a certain value:

How happy people are with their hosting
Rating % of users
10 34.37%
9 13.03%
8 15.76%
7 10.61%
6 5.62%
5 8.61%
4 2.50%
3 2.16%
2 1.80%
1 2.99%

The percentage of perfect ten ratings is almost identical to our 2019 survey, when it was 34.40%. That’s pretty wild when you consider both surveys are dealing with thousands of responses. In fact, the overall breakdown looks remarkably similar. Maybe there’s a psychology paper in there somewhere about how people give ratings on a ten-point scale?

💰⛔ People aren’t very satisfied with free WordPress hosting

If you’re on a budget, the concept of free WordPress hosting is pretty alluring. Being able to run a WordPress site without spending a dime? That’s tough to argue with.

However, it’s important to remember that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. In our post where we tested and examined free WordPress hosting, we found that it was fine for simple test environments, but not a good option for a serious website.

Our survey backs that data up, where users on free WordPress hosting were less satisfied than those using paid services. Despite that, there are still a significant number of people who do rely on free WordPress hosting – two free hosts made it into the top-15 most popular hosts in our survey, though neither cracked the top ten. Sometimes, budget trumps all.

000WebHost vs InfinityFree
Host Vote count % of respondents Rating
000WebHost 101 1.13% 5.54
InfinityFree 66 0.74% 6.80

We also tallied up the ratings for a number of free hosts that only got a few responses and the overall rating for free WordPress hosts was 6.08. This is well below the overall average satisfaction rating of 7.6 for all hosts. It’s also well below Namecheap at 8.35, which is one of the cheapest hosts on this list with regular price plans starting at just a few dollars per month.

With that being said, the ratings for free WordPress hosts also aren’t zero. If you’re willing to put up with a slightly worse experience, you still might find the promise of free WordPress hosting to be worth that trade-off.

Another interesting comparison is 000WebHost vs Hostinger because 000WebHost comes directly from the Hostinger family. Hostinger essentially uses 000WebHost as a marketing vehicle to drive users towards Hostinger’s paid plans. As you’d expect (and hope), paying Hostinger customers are a lot more satisfied than people using the free version:

000WebHost vs Hostinger
Host Vote count % of respondents Rating
000WebHost 101 1.13% 5.54
Hostinger 363 4.08% 7.93

So, at least in these examples, it seems like you get what you pay for.

☯️ Is “WordPress” a host?

A lot of people said that “WordPress” is their host. This was also a popular response in the 2019 edition of our survey, which shows that it isn’t a fluke.

Unfortunately, we don’t know if what they mean is WordPress.com or if they confuse what a host actually is. We did get a decent number of answers specifically for WordPress.com (50 results), so WordPress.com is popular enough in its own right.

We’ve had a couple more answers like that. Here are some of them:

“Who’s your host?” # of answers
“WordPress” 723
“cPanel” 17
“Plesk” 13
“Blog” 25
“free” 10
“WooCommerce” 7
“Elementor” 5

Perhaps what this proves more than anything else is how confusing the whole idea of hosting really is.

As pros, I believe that we absolutely can’t neglect the fact that WordPress isn’t as simple as we like to believe it is. Educating other casual users is key to helping them understand the platform and how to get the most out of it.

With WordPress running on 43.6% of all websites, it’s not surprising that a lot of users don’t have any knowledge or even interest in understanding the platform’s inner workings, or what makes one host better than the other.

Many casual users simply shop based on the price or based on the marketing messages that they see on the web. Many of them don’t even assume that one host might be slower or less reliable than the other.

This brings me to the next thing that we wanted to find out in this 2020 WordPress hosting survey:

🏎️ Is speed essential for users?

If you’re a WordPress pro, the performance of your servers is probably one of the key components of your overall satisfaction. But is it the same for everyone else? Do people really care that much?

While we did have a direct question on what people valued about their hosting setups, we’ve decided to go a step further here and actually use our own performance test data for making this analysis.

The following table reveals not whether people say that speed is important to them but instead focuses on the correlation between user ratings and real speed test data.

Hosting CompanyLoad timeRating
Bluehost1.668.02
DreamHost0.737.97
HostGator0.727.92
InMotion3.168.00
SiteGround0.738.38
A2 Hosting0.617.87

Based on this specific chunk of data, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation at all.

However, it’s worth pointing out that the loading times we get on our setups aren’t necessarily what other users get.

Let’s take a broader look at what people value the most:

⭐ What people value about their hosts

This was an optional question in this year’s WordPress hosting survey, but it still got 1400+ responses.

I think you can make a good guess what the no.1 most valued thing is, but let’s see the table anyway:

What users value about their hosting
What % of users
Support 43.91%
Price 21.43%
Speed 15.55%
Ease of use 15.06%
Features 10.99%
Reliability 10.71%
Uptime 4.90%
Security 3.85%
It’s free 3.57%

First off, why do these numbers add up to more than 100%? That’s an excellent question indeed. Our respondents often listed more than one thing when asked what they value about their WordPress hosting. So out of all the answers we got, we extracted the individual categories of “things” and then put them into a large spreadsheet. The results are what you see above.

So yes, support quality takes the first spot!

“[The importance of support] depends on a number of factors, and it depends on how you quantify support.

New website owners should make good hands-on support a priority as they are more likely to ask their hosting company for help with their website. Despite this, it’s common for new website owners to select a hosting company based on price, not quality of support (which is admittedly difficult to gauge before using a company).

Established website owners are unlikely to go to their hosting company for help with managing their website. Uptime and server response times are therefore a bigger concern, but if for any reason the server goes down, they will want someone to resolve the matter immediately.”

kevin muldoon

– Kevin Muldoon

Experienced blogger and internet marketer who loves working with WordPress. Makes money through blogs, content websites, forums, and YouTube.

kevinmuldoon.com // @Twitter

Interestingly, speed is there on spot no.3 despite our own data telling us that speed isn’t such a factor in practice. (Again, we discussed this in the previous section.)

Another thing we can look at here are the leading hosting companies for each of the most popular top-valued “things.” In other words, which hosting company got the most votes for their customer support, price, and speed. Here are the answers:

Top-rated hosting companies for customer support
Host People who value “support”
Bluehost 58
SiteGround 45
GoDaddy 45
HostGator 35
Namecheap 31
Top-rated hosting companies for price
Host People who value “price”
Namecheap 20
Hostinger 20
Bluehost 18
Top-rated hosting companies for speed
Host People who value “speed”
SiteGround 27
Hostinger 21
Bluehost 15

Granted, the numbers are not huge here, but it’s still an interesting tidbit of info to ponder.

Support is essential, especially because a sizable portion of WordPress site owners are not server maintenance experts. One main selling point of most CMSes is ease of use. With that ease of use comes a low threshold of entry for users, and reliance on support. When I recommend hosting to people, I always tell them to choose a host with solid support, and use that support when needed.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen

🎭 Hosts that are part of the Endurance International Group vs the rest

As you may know, EIG is one of the biggest hosting firms on the market. However, for the most part, they’ve remained somewhat in the background and don’t market themselves in the open at all.

They achieved their success by acquiring many other hosting companies and then letting them operate under their original brand names.

Every year, we like to look at how the companies under the EIG umbrella fare against the rest of the pack. This year’s results are kind of surprising. Here’s what we found:

Top EIG hosting companies as rated by users
Host Votes Rating 2020 Rating 2019
Bluehost 856 8.02 8.07
HostGator 446 7.92 7.84
BigRock 34 6.86 7.40
iPage 34 7.00 7.68
JustHost 16 6.88
Average for all EIG hosts 7.88

Now let’s compare these against the top non-EIG hosts from the survey:

Top hosting companies as rated by users excluding EIG hosts
Host Votes Rating 2020 Rating 2019
GoDaddy 898 7.36 7.43
SiteGround 430 8.38 8.64
Hostinger 363 7.93 7.90
Namecheap 232 8.35 8.19
Google 152 7.96 7.80
Average for top 20 non-EIG hosts 7.67

It appears that EIG hosts have gotten comparatively better ratings than other companies. This was a bit surprising, considering that EIG companies allegedly don’t have the best reputation on the web. When push comes to shove, however, they seem to be alright.

(These are weighted averages where the numbers of votes are the weights.)

♻️ Which hosts are people planning to switch to?

Apart from asking our users to rate their current hosts, we also asked which hosts they’re planning to switch to, if any. Here are the most popular answers of people who are planning to switch:

Which hosting are you planning to switch to?
Host # of votes % of votes
Bluehost 68 11.39%
SiteGround 43 7.20%
WordPress (?) 43 7.20%
GoDaddy 42 7.04%
Hostinger 27 4.52%
HostGator 25 4.19%
“Free” (?) 22 3.69%
Google 14 2.35%
Amazon AWS 13 2.18%
Any 10 1.68%

The top of this list is remarkably similar to last year. These are all the most popular options, so it makes sense that they would have the most people looking to switch to them.

We also have the same ambiguity with people responding “WordPress”. Are these people who want to move to WordPress.com? Are they unhappy with a website builder like Squarespace and Wix and looking to move to WordPress as a CMS? It’s hard to know for sure.

One interesting note is the appearance of Google and AWS at the end of this list. With the rapid growth of cloud computing, it makes sense that an increasing number of people are interested in hosting their WordPress sites in the cloud.

Finally, we love the “Any” response. We’re guessing there’s a lot of overlap between the people who rated their current host zero and this response. If literally anything would be better than where they’re at, things must be pretty bleak!

🖥️🖥️🖥️ How many sites do users host?

Most people, a huge plurality and almost a majority, only host a single website.

Here’s how the data breaks down:

How many sites do you manage with your host?
# of sites # of votes % of votes
1 website 1,804 48.59%
2 websites 564 15.19%
3-5 websites 639 17.21%
6-10 websites 220 5.93%
10+ websites 486 13.09%

This year, we chose to break things down a little differently. Last year, our starting range was “1-5 websites”, which gobbled up 71.73% of the vote. Because so many users fall in that range, we chose to get a little more specific this year, which shows that most of the people who fell in that range in 2019 were probably just hosting a single website.

It also shows how cheap shared hosts are able to get away with advertising “unlimited” websites – most people are only going to host a single site anyway.

One interesting thing is that people are more likely to host between three and five websites than they are to host two websites. I guess if you’re already creating a second site, it’s tempting to create a couple more, too. Similarly, people are more likely to host more than ten websites than between six to ten websites.

These trends are not that surprising on their own. It’s expected that most people don’t have that many websites. However, let’s have a look at something a bit more interesting – how happy people are with their host vs how many sites they host:

How many sites do you manage with your host?
# of sites User rating
1 website 7.48
2 websites 7.74
3-5 websites 8.26
6-10 websites 8.33
over 10 websites 8.52

In general, the more sites you host, the happier you are. As the number of websites hosted increased, the overall rating also increased across the board.

The prices people pay vs the number of sites they host

Another thing we must talk about in relation to how many sites people host on their setups is how much they pay for it.

With this many companies offering “unlimited” plans, we wanted to see if the cost does indeed grow with the number of sites hosted or does it plateau at some point.

Here’s what we found:

Web hosting cost vs no. of sites hosted
“How many websites do you manage with your host?” Median cost per month
1 website $4.00
2 websites $5.00
3 – 5 websites $10.00
6 – 10 websites $12.00
over 10 websites $14.00

Perhaps not too surprising in hindsight, but people’s hosting bills do indeed grow the more sites they host on a single account.

Two interesting takeaways:

  • The median for two websites is only $1 more than for one website. Meaning that adding a second site will only cost you around $1 more per month.
  • Hosting more than ten websites will cost only $4 more per month than hosting three websites.

Something we’re not showing you in the table above are the average costs. Those were actually surprisingly high. For example, the average cost of hosting one website turned out to be $21.06 per month. What this means is that a handful of people are really overpaying for hosting. This raises the average value by $17.06 compared to the median.

Here’s a broader look at people’s hosting bills:

💰 How much people pay for WordPress hosting

Let’s not keep you waiting:

The median WordPress hosting bill is $6 per month.

Here’s a deeper look that compares the percentages of people who fall into a given pricing bracket:

Price bracketPercent of users
$016.18%
$1 or less6.56%
$1.01 - $25.88%
$2.01 - $37.40%
$3.01 - $44.85%
$4.01 - $57.28%
$5.01 - $87.24%
$8.01 - $109.46%
$10.01 - $157.91%
$15.01 - $206.36%
$20.01 - $406.92%
$41 - $604.06%
$61 - $1003.78%
$101 - $2002.15%
$201 - $4991.87%
$500 +1.99%
$5,0000.12%

Some takeaways:

  • The most popular bracket? $0. More than 16% of people who gave us an answer pay $0 for WordPress hosting.
  • The most popular paid bracket? $8.01 – $10 per month at 9.46%.
  • More than 19% of people pay between $2 and $5 per month.

If you look at the top players in the shared hosting and VPS hosting world, most of them are successful due to cheap prices, a simplified user-interface for beginners and a huge marketing budget.

Kevin Muldoon

How much people pay vs the company they host with

We were curious how much people pay on average with each of the most popular hosting companies. Here’s what we found:

HostMedian (per mo.)
000WebHost$0.00
InfinityFree$0.00
WordPress.com$0.00
Namecheap$3.00
Hostinger$5.00
Bluehost$7.00
IONOS by 1&1$8.00
DreamHost$8.00
One.com$8.00
GoDaddy$10.00
Amazon AWS$10.50
SiteGround$11.00
HostGator$12.00
A2 Hosting$13.00
OVH$13.00
InMotion Hosting$14.00

Takeaways:

  • People are not crazy about WordPress.com’s paid plans. The median is still $0.
  • Namecheap really does come through here with users paying close to the advertised price of $2.88 a month.
  • With Hostinger, even though they promote themselves as $1-a-month-host, users end up paying in the range of $5 per month.
  • Most budget hosts like HostGator, A2 Hosting, InMotion Hosting end up costing people much more than what’s advertised.

🏠 Do people host their own sites?

In each survey, we have a handful of answers from people hosting their own sites. Here are the numbers for this year:

Users hosting sites on their own
Hosting setup # of votes
My own server/company/host 48
localhost 27
XAMPP 14

Together, those answers account for a mere 0.999% of all entries.

🌱 The main differences vs our previous WordPress hosting surveys

We’ve been doing two kinds of hosting surveys here on the blog.

  • End-user surveys – like the one we’re presenting the results of here
  • Advanced-user surveys – where we ask WordPress pros and developers to share who they think are the top WordPress companies in the market

As you would expect, these surveys deliver vastly different results. While WordPress pros are keen on hosts like WP Engine or Kinsta, casual users work with GoDaddy and Bluehost most of all (as we’ve seen in this survey). But let’s go a bit more in-depth.

First, here’s what has changed since our previous end-user WordPress hosting surveys, which we did in 2017 and 2019:

There’s some movement here, mostly drops, but the lineup is the same. The three most popular hosts last year were GoDaddy, Bluehost, and HostGator, and they still lead the market in 2020. These were also the three most popular hosts in our 2017 survey, so really not much has changed over the last four years.

That being said, HostGator has dropped to no.3 in popularity, while Bluehost has grown a lot to secure no.2. Another interesting thing here is how close SiteGround is to HostGator in this year’s responses. In terms of raw numbers, HostGator got only 16 more votes than SiteGround. This trend is also reflected in Google Trends. As of September 2020, SiteGround has actually pulled ahead of HostGator, so it will be interesting to see if it moves up even more in future surveys:

SiteGround vs HostGator in Google Trends

Setting popularity aside, let’s take a look at how the overall ratings have changed. Here’s the data:

 What casual users think of their WordPress hosts: 
Host2020 rating2019 ratingChange
Siteground8.388.64-0.27
Namecheap8.358.190.16
IONOS by 1&18.027.470.54
Bluehost8.028.07-0.06
Hostinger7.937.900.04
HostGator7.927.840.08
GoDaddy7.367.43-0.07
000WebHost5.546.71-1.17

The changes aren’t huge – though SiteGround and DreamHost did have small ~0.25 drops. Unfortunately for iPage users, iPage suffered the biggest decline at -0.68 (and it had already declined by -0.75 between our 2017 and 2019 surveys).

We’re actually kind of happy that we’re seeing ratings that are so similar to our 2019 and 2017 WordPress hosting surveys. Beyond any other conclusions, this is at least some evidence that these surveys hold up over time.

Another observation we can make is that the WordPress hosting market doesn’t change that much overall. The leaders remain the same for the most part, and the quality of service that these leaders offer remains much the same as well.

Now for something that you might consider much more interesting, here are the differences vs our last advanced-user survey:

 What pro users think of their WordPress hosts: 
Host2020 rating2018 rating (pros)Change
SiteGround8.389.20-0.82
Bluehost8.026.601.42
InMotion Hosting8.008.40-0.40
DreamHost7.978.20-0.23
HostGator7.927.400.52
GoDaddy7.367.000.36

Big-name companies seem to get better ratings from end-users, while boutique, more pro-centered companies get better ratings from advanced users. I guess no surprise here.

We asked Kevin Muldoon and Morten Rand-Hendriksen to share their take on why pros and developers generally recommend WP Engine or Kinsta, while casual users host their sites with Bluehost or GoDaddy:

I agree that casual users and beginners gravitate towards cheaper solutions, but I do not agree that pro users and developers use WP Engine and Kinsta.

WP Engine and Kinsta have proven themselves in the industry, but if you’ve ever hosted your websites on your own server, you will understand that it can be frustrating to use a managed website host as you need to open support tickets to change basic settings that you would normally change yourself in seconds via the terminal.

My guess is that it’s mostly businesses that gravitate towards managed hosting solutions as they handle most website administration tasks for you. Most developers will probably opt for a cloud hosting solution such as Digital Ocean, Vultr or Cloudways, as they’re cheaper and give you significantly more control.

Kevin Muldoon

Developers recommend industrial scale hosting like WP Engine, Kinsta, and Pagely because they work with (or imagine they’re working with) industrial scale sites. People in general choose shared hosting solutions like Bluehost and GoDaddy because they are significantly cheaper and serve the needs of most sites.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen

2019 WordPress hosting survey results

 Audience: casual WordPress users. Number of respondents: 6,500+. 

🔥 GoDaddy takes the market

Did you expect it to be any other way?

Like really, did you?

Indeed, GoDaddy is the most popular host in this edition of our WordPress hosting survey for 2019. Here’s the top five:

This is not a full list of hosts – just the most popular responses.

GoDaddy is not a big name inside the WordPress hosting “bubble”. But guess what? Not only are WordPress users using GoDaddy … they’re actually pretty dang happy. While not the highest recommendation score in our WordPress hosting survey, GoDaddy clocked in at a respectable 7.43 average on our recommendation scale.

In the end, I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised at GoDaddy’s popularity. While it’s not on most “best WordPress hosting” lists, the company has been snapping up WordPress properties at a rapid pace. They’re also quite active at WordCamps, often sponsoring the events as one of the top-tier sponsors.

Interestingly, the popularity of the top five hosts in our survey reflects the overall market popularity quite well. Here’s a quick Google Trends comparison, which isn’t a perfect metric, yes, but still gives us a good overview of how popular these companies actually are compared to one another:

hosting trends vs this WordPress hosting survey

Right, GoDaddy seems to be missing there, let me fix this for you:

hosting trends 2

On another note, considering HostGator and Bluehost are 5x (ish) bigger than SiteGround, it’s really impressive that SiteGround has still managed to get nearly as many entries.

One more intriguing takeaway is that the managed WordPress hosting space hasn’t been represented that much in this WordPress hosting survey.

In our previous surveys (the ones geared at pro WordPress users), companies like WP Engine and Kinsta had their fair share of votes. In this year’s survey, they got only 25 and 9 votes, respectively. This only shows how different the WordPress hosting space is when talking to casual users vs people working with WordPress every day.

This is the part of the 2019 WordPress hosting survey that we’ve been really interested in.

The US market is kind of predictable in terms of who’s going to be popular. I mean, all those Super Bowl ads have to account for something, right, GoDaddy?

But what about the international markets? Is GoDaddy just as popular in, say, Australia as it is in the US? Let’s see.

Out of 6,500+ answers, only around 29.13% come from the US, which makes the large majority international.

Here are the top 10 countries and their most popular hosting companies:

Most popular WordPress hosting companies by country
Country % of entries in the country Most popular host in 2019 Most popular host in 2017
USA 16.43% Bluehost GoDaddy
India 19.94% GoDaddy GoDaddy
United Kingdom 6.69% SiteGround GoDaddy
Nigeria 12.25% WhoGoHost WhoGoHost
Canada 18.18% Bluehost GoDaddy
Pakistan 9.18% GoDaddy GoDaddy
South Africa 21.88% Afrihost Afrihost
Australia 10.71% Bluehost GoDaddy

Or, for a more interactive presentation (click on country):

🏆 Who’s the top rated WordPress hosting company of 2019?

Okay, let’s cut to the chase, here are the top rated WordPress hosting companies according to our 6,500+ survey respondents:

* This is only the top 10. You can get the full data file at the bottom of this post.

For the above table, we’ve only decided to feature the companies that got more than 50 entries. Had there not been any threshold, companies like A2 Hosting and Amazon AWS would have made the list in the top 10. However, we don’t feel super-confident putting them above the other players who have gotten a lot more votes.

If you’re a “WordPress person” you’re probably pretty happy to see SiteGround there at the top. This outcome is also very reassuring considering that we’ve been recommending SiteGround to our readers for a while now, so we’re happy they’re getting a great experience!

Apart from that, the big-name brands like Namecheap and Bluehost seem to be doing very good in the survey – both of them being in the top five.

Also in the top five, you can find all three of the hosts officially endorsed by WordPress.org – SiteGround, DreamHost and Bluehost.

Of course, our WordPress hosting survey wasn’t only about the big players. The respondents actually mentioned more than 1,500(!) different hosting companies.

official recommended hosts

👍 People are generally happy with their hosting

The average rating given by the respondents was 7.4 / 10. This means that the top five most popular hosts in this WordPress hosting survey have scored above average ratings.

Interestingly, this overall score was a bit higher in our 2017 survey – at 7.7. Does this 0.3 drop mean anything? That I leave for you to decide. I wouldn’t jump to conclusions too soon, and I also find it hard to believe that WordPress hosting has dropped in quality overall in the past two years.

For a more detailed breakdown, here’s the percentage of people who have rated their host a certain value:

How happy people are with their hosting
Rating % of users
10 35.93%
9 11.76%
8 15.73%
7 10.56%
6 6.59%
5 9.57%
4 2.72%
3 2.37%
2 2.02%
1 2.74%

🌱 The main differences vs our previous WordPress hosting surveys

We’ve been doing two kinds of hosting surveys here on the blog.

  • End-user surveys – like the one we’re presenting the results of here
  • Advanced-user surveys – where we ask WordPress pros and developers to share who they think are the top WordPress companies in the market

As you would expect, these surveys deliver vastly different results. While WordPress pros are keen on hosts like WP Engine or Kinsta, casual users work with GoDaddy and Bluehost most of all (as we’ve seen in this survey). But let’s go a bit more in-depth.

First, here’s what has changed since our last end-user WordPress hosting survey, which we did in 2017:

The general trends are roughly the same. The three most popular hosts back in 2017 were GoDaddy, Bluehost and HostGator, and they still lead the market in 2019.

That being said, HostGator has dropped to no.3 in popularity, while Bluehost has grown a lot to secure no.2. A bit further down the road, SiteGround nearly doubled their reach. Let’s see what Google Trends has to say about that:

SiteGround vs HostGator

Setting popularity aside, let’s take a look at how the overall ratings have changed. Here’s the data:

 What casual users think of their WordPress hosts: 
Hosting Company2019 Rating2017 RatingChange
1&1 IONOS7.477.420.05
Bluehost8.077.930.14
DreamHost8.258.66-0.41
GoDaddy7.437.64-0.21
HostGator7.848.02-0.18
Hostinger7.907.580.32
InMotion7.828.11-0.29
iPage7.687.75-0.07
Namecheap8.198.040.15
SiteGround8.648.560.08
WordPress7.497.140.35

The changes aren’t huge – the biggest one in the top 10 is DreamHost losing 0.41. The top five has fluctuated only marginally.

We’re actually kind of happy that we’re seeing ratings that are so similar to our 2017 WordPress hosting survey. If not anything, this is at least some evidence that these surveys hold up over time.

Another observation we can make is that the WordPress hosting market doesn’t change that much overall. The leaders remain the same for the most part, and the quality of service that these leaders offer remains much the same as well.

Now for something that you might consider much more interesting, here are the differences vs our last advanced-user survey:

 What pro users think of their WordPress hosts: 
Hosting Company2019 Rating (end users)2018 Rating (pros)Change
Bluehost8.076.61.47
DreamHost8.258.20.05
GoDaddy7.4370.43
HostGator7.847.40.44
InMotion7.828.4-0.58
SiteGround8.649.2-0.56

Big-name companies seem to get better ratings from end users, while boutique, more pro-centered companies get better ratings from advanced users. I guess no surprise here.

☯️ Is “WordPress” a host?

There’s something interesting you might have noticed in one of the tables above.

A lot of people said that “WordPress” is their host.

Unfortunately, we don’t know if what they mean is WordPress.com or if they confuse what a host actually is.

We’ve had a couple more answers like that. Here are some of them:

“Who’s your host?” # of answers
“WordPress” 332
“don’t know” 29
“ThemeIsle” 4
“XAMPP” 16
“cPanel” 17

Perhaps what this proves more than anything else is how confusing the whole idea of hosting really is.

As pros, I believe that we absolutely can’t neglect the fact that WordPress isn’t as simple of a tool as we like to believe it is. Educating other casual users is key to helping them understand the platform and how to get the most out of it.

With WordPress running on more than 30% of all websites, it’s not surprising that a lot of users don’t have any knowledge or even interest in understanding the platform’s inner workings, or what makes one host better than the other.

Many casual users simply shop based on the price or based on the marketing messages that they see on the web. Many of them don’t even assume that one host might be slower or less reliable than the other.

This brings me to the next thing that we wanted to find out in this 2019 WordPress hosting survey:

🏎️ Is speed essential for users?

If you’re a WordPress pro, the performance of your servers is probably one of the key components of your overall satisfaction. But is it the same for everyone else? Do people really care that much?

To say it shortly, people do care about speed, some.

First off, let’s do a quick comparison of the survey results vs our own performance data for popular hosts:

Hosting CompanyLoad timeRating
Bluehost2.878.07
DreamHost1.548.25
GoDaddy0.897.43
HostGator1.447.84
InMotion0.477.82
SiteGround0.748.64

There is some correlation here, but nothing too brutal. Some of the fastest companies sit relatively further down the list, while others with longer loading times earn higher spots. Also, it’s worth pointing out that the loading times we get on our setups with each host aren’t necessarily what other users get.

Let’s take a broader look at what people value about their hosting setups:

⭐ What people value about their hosts

I think you can already make a good guess what the no.1 most valued thing is, but let’s see the table anyway:

What users value about their hosting
What % of users
Support 17.32%
Price 10.26%
Customer service 9.10%
Speed 7.28%
Ease of use 6.26%
Reliability 4.29%
Uptime 3.64%
It’s free 2.18%
Security 1.67%

Yes, support quality takes the first spot.

This was an optional question in this WordPress hosting survey, but it still got around 1,370 responses.

🗺️ Users worldwide are just about equally satisfied

Most hosts market internationally nowadays, and it’s fairly common for hosts to at least offer data centers in North America, Europe, the UK, and Asia.

While that’s true, most major hosts on our list are still headquartered in the US. This led us to wonder; are hosts managing to connect with international customers just as well as customers from the US?

To try to get a gauge on international opinions, we divided responses for our top four hosts by US and non-US users:

Host Non-US Votes Non-US Rating US Votes US Rating
Bluehost 276 7.98 316 8.16
GoDaddy 456 7.38 267 7.53
HostGator 218 7.81 183 7.91
SiteGround 167 8.68 134 8.59

Except for SiteGround, the US respondents were slightly more likely to recommend their host than international respondents. With that being said, the differences aren’t large enough to declare statistical significance.

Without higher sample sizes, we can only say that customers around the world all seem to be fairly evenly happy with their hosts.

🎭 Hosts that are part of the Endurance International Group

As you may know, EIG is one of the biggest hosting firms in the market. However, for the most part, they’ve remained somewhat in the background and don’t market themselves in the open at all.

They achieved their success by acquiring a large number of other hosting companies and then letting them operate under their original brand names.

This practice – of acquiring companies and then optimizing their infrastructure for profit – doesn’t always sit well with some users.

Naturally, we wanted to see how EIG companies stand in our 2019 WordPress hosting survey. Here’s what we found:

EIG hosting companies as rated by users
Host Votes Rating
Bluehost 592 8.07
HostGator 402 7.84
iPage 53 7.68
BigRock 28 7.40
Just Host 17 5.63
FatCow 13 7.08

The table above features only the companies that got at least 10 mentions.

♻️ Which hosts are people planning to switch to?

Apart from asking our users to rate their current hosts, we also asked which hosts are they planning to switch to, if any. Here are the most popular answers:

Which hosting are you planning to switch to?
Host # of votes % of votes
Don’t know 257 29.88%
Bluehost 90 10.47%
WordPress 52 6.05%
SiteGround 35 4.07%
GoDaddy 30 3.49%
HostGator 23 2.67%
Hostinger 13 1.51%
Namecheap 12 1.40%

The first time around we did this survey, the most popular answer was WP Engine. In this year’s WordPress hosting survey, only one person said they wanted to switch to WP Engine.

🖥️🖥️🖥️ How many sites do users host?

Here’s how the data breaks down:

How many sites do you manage with your host?
# of sites # of votes % of votes
1 – 5 websites 2,091 71.73%
5 – 10 websites 406 13.93%
10 – 50 websites 252 8.64%
over 50 websites 166 5.69%

These trends are not that surprising on their own. It’s expected that most people host just 1-5 sites. However, let’s have a look at something a bit more interesting – how happy people are with their host vs how many sites they host:

How many sites do you manage with your host?
# of sites User rating
1 – 5 websites 7.47
5 – 10 websites 8.29
10 – 50 websites 8.33
over 50 websites 8.06

In general, the more sites you host, the happier you are (except for hosting more than 50 sites … I guess this scenario carries its own challenges).

🏠 Do many people host their own sites?

That’s an interesting thing to look at. Here are the answers that can be interpreted as “hosting myself”:

Users hosting sites on their own
Hosting setup # of votes
My own server/company/host 54
localhost 38
XAMPP 16

Together, those answers account for a mere 1.66% of all entries.

2018 WordPress hosting survey results

 Audience: pro WordPress users. Number of respondents: 830. 

Why do a WordPress hosting survey?

We’ve been looking into the topic of WordPress hosting for a while now. Testing different hosts, experimenting with configurations, testing site speeds, load impact metrics, analyzing the offerings, pricing, etc.

We want for our recommendations to always be on point, but we can only go so far if we rely on just our own data. That is why finding out about the actual real-world performance of web hosts is so important.

So that was the main objective of the survey – to get actual input from actual real users, and truly learn which companies perform well for people in the long run vs which don’t perform at all.

Things we wanted to learn

As you would expect, the no.1 goal was to name the top recommended hosting company for WordPress.

The “WordPress hosting” label gets thrown around a lot these days, and every new host to the market claims to be the most optimized WordPress solution in existence. We wanted to test who’s really telling the truth here. But we were also after the fine details of the whole hosting experience.

The survey respondents

The audience this blog attracts is more on the pro side of the spectrum. For instance, 78.67% of the survey respondents identify themselves as WordPress pros (developers, designers, experts, people otherwise knowledgeable about WordPress). This means that their opinion of certain web hosts might be different from what the casual user would say. And it probably is … which our previous survey – the 2017 edition confirmed.

But that’s a good thing. WordPress pros is essentially the group that drives the movement in this space forward, and the people whom everyone else asks for advice when looking for the best host for their WordPress sites.

Here’s a more in-depth look at the respondents:

How many sites people host

This is a really interesting piece of data to start with. First off, the total number of websites hosted among our respondents is 11,736. Wow!

Some more detail:

Hosting own sites vs for clients? How many sites do you have hosted?
Just me 5 (average) / 3 (median)
Clients 23 (average) / 10 (median)
Totals 14 (average) / 5 (median)

We certainly didn’t expect to see the numbers being that high. Even if we look just at the median, 5 sites is a huge number! This also tells us that our average respondent is quite far from hosting “just their one small personal blog.”

Also, it’s quite expected that people hosting sites for clients will report higher numbers here. On the average, those users have around 3.5x-4.5x times more sites hosted with their providers.

How many hosts did you test prior to the current one?

A huge majority of our respondents (more than 73%) report to have used 1-5 hosting companies prior to their current ones.

Here are the specifics:

How many hosts have you used prior to this? % of users # of users
0 (my first host) 10.00% 83
1-2 35.30% 293
3-5 38.43% 319
6-10 12.41% 103
10+ 2.65% 22
unspecified 1.20% 10

This is yet another thing that highlights our respondents’ experience with hosting, and perhaps also a testament that you’re not very likely to stumble upon your perfect hosting company on the first go.

Lastly, let’s look at the traffic numbers that our survey respondents drive to their sites.

How much traffic do you get?

WordPress hosting survey respondents say:

Your average monthly traffic numbers % of users # of users
less than 2,000 UVs 32.77% 272
2,001 – 5,000 17.71% 147
5,001 – 10,000 13.73% 114
10,001 – 20,000 9.88% 82
20,001 – 50,000 9.28% 77
50,001 – 100,000 7.23% 60
100,001 – 1,000,000 5.90% 49
more than 1,000,000 1.81% 15
unspecified 1.69% 14

Albeit this survey has reached WordPress pros most of all, actually more than 50% of the respondents report to receive less than 5,000 unique visitors a month. On the other end of the spectrum, only 24.22% get more than 20,000 UVs, and the rest falls somewhere in between.

Okay, since we know who the audience was, let’s now get onto the fun stuff! Staring with the biggie:

🥇  Best rated WordPress hosting companies 

Here are 10 of the top rated WordPress hosting companies according to our 830 survey respondents:

  • The hosting companies with the least number of entries have not been included
  • Market popularity according to Alexa – lower values mean more popular
Hosting CompanyRating / 5Survey PopularityMarket Popularity (Alexa)
GoDaddy3.50.41223
Bluehost3.30.261780
HostGator3.70.301872
WPEngine4.40.374065
SiteGround4.61.005708
DreamHost4.10.2210030
A2 Hosting3.80.1612709
Cloudways4.50.3918544
Kinsta4.80.2523350
Flywheel4.60.1834689

Setting the ratings themselves aside (we’ll talk about those in a minute), it’s worth mentioning that we did get very different numbers of entries for each company. Please take this into consideration when interpreting the results for yourself. What this basically means is that those ratings don’t all carry the same weight.

Every survey is a snapshot in time telling something about a specific group of respondents. In our case, that group are WordPress pros and people generally taking care of multiple websites. Among them, SiteGround is the most popular choice (getting 16.27% of all survey entires).

However, please keep in mind that this doesn’t reflect the market as a whole since SiteGround is not the top player out there – this you can see if you sort the table above by the last column. The same goes, or even more so, for companies like Cloudways and Kinsta.

Whatever you see in this WordPress hosting survey should be compared to at least two other sources of data. First, let’s look at a more general survey that we did in 2017.

That one reached the casual WordPress user since it was conducted based on pop-up questions on our blogs and websites.

In it, we discovered that GoDaddy is still the sole giant in this market. Followed by HostGator and Bluehost, with everyone else far behind. This is also in tune with the Alexa data that we’re quoting above. That general survey also indicated nearly no entries for “boutique” (excuse the term) companies like Kinsta and Cloudways.

Then, there’s an even more objective source of data – Google Trends. I do realize it’s not a perfect metric, but still gives us a good overview of how popular these companies actually are compared to one another. Here’s a quick search comparing the popular hosts as per this survey:

hosting trends

Here’s what happens with HostGator and Bluehost added to the mix:

HostGator and Bluehost trends

Now see what happens when we add GoDaddy:

GoDaddy trends

Even though we need to be careful here since GoDaddy is much more than a hosting company, we still need to realize its dominance.

HostGator and Bluehost are 5x (ish) bigger than SiteGround, with Cloudways and Kinsta barely even registering when looking at the grand scheme of things.

With that said, we have to give credit where credit’s due … no matter how we do these surveys, no matter if they reach the casual user or the WordPress pro, SiteGround is still there near the top or at the top when it comes to user ratings and overall popularity. This year, they’ve scored the second best rating at 4.6 / 5 while getting the most entries.

The main differences vs our previous hosting survey

Our 2016 WordPress hosting survey featured similar questions and reached a similar audience. This allows us to compare the differences in the ratings for our featured hosts.

Company2016 rating2018 ratingDifference
SiteGround4.64.60
GoDaddy3.53.50
WPEngine4.24.40.2
HostGator3.73.70
Bluehost3.03.30.3
Kinsta4.94.8-0.1
DreamHost4.34.1-0.2
Flywheel4.74.6-0.1

As you can see, the differences are very slim. This actually makes us happy, since it’s evidence that these surveys really provide actual insight and represent the WordPress hosting market fairly well.

Shout-out to Bluehost for improving by 0.3. Maybe one day…

Though, in all honestly, the mainstream hosting companies do tend to get a lot of bad press that’s not always deserved. Here’s Syed Balkhi raising a very interesting point:

Syed Balkhi on hosting survey results

Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

Often larger brands like Bluehost, HostGator, GoDaddy, etc. get a negative reputation in the community, which I think is a bit unfair at times. For every customer that complains, there are hundreds who’re happy. These companies are hosting millions of WordPress websites and if you actually talk with their team, they’re doing amazing stuff behind-the-scenes when it comes to their technology stack. As developers and website builders, we need to fully understand our customers’ needs before sending everyone to an overpriced solution.

😃 How happy people are with their hosting

A very general conclusion when looking at the data is that, overall, people are very happy with their current hosts:

83.2% of the respondents rate their hosting providers at 4 or higher. Also, 89.6% would recommend their host to other people.

Despite a range of answers to all the other questions, most people seem – if not always 100% happy – at least content with their current hosting provider.

In fact, 87% of our respondents plan to extend their hosting subscriptions after they expire, with only 13% planning to cancel.

More interestingly, we also asked respondents which hosting company they would choose if money were no object:

  • 66% of respondents would still stick with their current host
  • 34.6% would choose another hosting platform; of those people, 14.5% say it would be WPEngine

💰 How much money people pay for their WordPress hosting

Here’s the distribution across the five most popular hosting companies, and the total numbers for all, in dollars per month:

Company < $5 $5 – $10 $10 – $15 $15 – $20 $20 – $30 $30 – $50 $50 – $100 $100 – $200 > $200
SiteGround 13.3% 18.5% 23.7% 11.8% 13.3% 2.9% 12.6% 2.2% 1.5%
GoDaddy 23.2% 21.4% 21.4% 10.7% 8.9% 10.7% 1.8% 1.8%
WPEngine 2.0% 19.6% 13.7% 25.5% 13.7% 23.5%
HostGator 14.6% 26.8% 19.5% 7.3% 14.6% 9.8% 2.4% 4.9%
Bluehost 27.8% 22.2% 16.7% 16.7% 8.3% 2.8% 5.6%
Average for all companies 17.1% 21.1% 16.7% 8.9% 10.6% 5.8% 8.9% 5.4% 5.4%

How to read these tables?

Some examples:

  • 13.3% of SiteGround’s customers pay less than $5 a month
  • 25.5% of WPEngine’s customers pay $50-$100 a month
  • 21.1% of all respondents pay $5-$10 a month
  • 38% of all respondents pay less than $10 / mo
  • 55% of all respondents pay less than $15 / mo

Some tweetables related to that:

One more conclusion that we can draw here is that the de facto cheapest hosts out there are Bluehost and GoDaddy, since those companies have the most users in their sub $5 tiers. In comparison, even though there are cheap plans at HostGator as well, only 14.6% of their customers end up selecting them, compared to 26.8% opting for the $5-$10 tier.

We also asked our respondents how happy they were with the value they’re getting for their money. Here’s what they said:

Cloudways 4.5
SiteGround 4.3
Kinsta 4.3
Flywheel 4.0
DreamHost 3.8
WPEngine 3.7
HostGator 3.5
GoDaddy 3.2
Bluehost 3.1
Average 4.0

Cloudways is the leader, with SiteGround and Kinsta close behind.

Interestingly, those cheap prices don’t help neither GoDaddy nor Bluehost achieve a good value-for-money rating.

One more interesting result here is DreamHost. In this WordPress hosting survey, it’s only at 3.8 in value-for-money, but two years ago their users rated them at 4.4, which was the second best rating.

The total rating – all hosting companies combined – hasn’t changed in two years and it’s still at 4.0 / 5.

🤼 WordPress hosts compared head to head

This is the part where we compare different hosting companies against each other, dividing them into a handful of categories. Let’s start with the following:

Mainstream hosting companies vs the rest

On one side we have the GoDaddys, Bluehosts, and HostGators of the hosting space, and on the other we have everyone else.

(Charts by Visualizer Lite.)

As you can see, the mainstream hosts sit a bit lower than their “boutique” competitors when it comes to the overall ratings. The average difference between the mainstream and the rest is -1.0 in rating points.

Is there a difference in reported reliability as well?

The story is very similar here. The average difference in reported reliability is -0.9 in rating points.

Let’s now take a look at the type of user that usually finds themselves hosting with a mainstream company:

Users of Hosting client sites Hosting own sites Hosting this many sites
GoDaddy 53.57% 39.29% 10
HostGator 39.02% 60.98% 14
Bluehost 27.78% 72.22% 7
SiteGround 62.22% 37.04% 13
WPEngine 66.67% 31.37% 18
Cloudways 56.60% 43.40% 12

Although nothing too brutal is going on here, we can still see a slight trend nonetheless:

  • Customers of mainstream hosts are more likely to host their own sites. Customers of not-mainstream hosts are more likely to host their clients’ sites.
  • Customers of mainstream hosts have fewer sites on the average than customers of not-mainstream hosts.

Lastly, let’s take a look at the number of hosting companies that someone has used prior to landing on their current one:

How many hosting companies have you used prior to this one?
Currently using 1-2 3-5 6-10 It’s my first host More than 10
GoDaddy 35.7% 35.7% 5.4% 19.6%
HostGator 34.1% 29.3% 2.4% 31.7% 2.4%
Bluehost 41.7% 36.1% 11.1% 8.3%
SiteGround 36.3% 47.4% 8.1% 3.7% 3.7%
WPEngine 25.5% 41.2% 21.6% 3.9% 3.9%
Cloudways 39.6% 39.6% 11.3% 7.5%

How to read this table? Example: 41.2% of WPEngine users have tested 3-5 hosts before that.

Conclusions? Well, for instance:

  • If you’re on WPEngine or SiteGround then it’s most likely not your first host.
  • HostGator, on the other hand, is the most popular first-host choice in our WordPress hosting survey.
  • Smaller companies, like Cloudways, are often something that people find after they’ve run through a large number of other hosts. 7.5% of Cloudways’ users have tested more than 10 hosts.

However, the differences in these numbers aren’t huge, which is a result of the survey reaching a more experienced group of users.

What about the WordPress.org-approved hosts?

As you surely know, there’s this mysterious, legendary, dare I say even magic web page at WordPress.org listing some recommended hosting companies.

This web page has always been controversial. Essentially, no one knows how/why certain companies get their spot on the list.

The saga started with just Bluehost. Then we saw DreamHost, Flywheel, and SiteGround join the list. Then, after a while, Flywheel lost their spot.

At the time of writing, we’re left with these three on the list, in this order: Bluehost, DreamHost, SiteGround.

It just so happens that all of these companies have been rated and talked about in our WordPress hosting survey, so let’s now see how they stack up against each other and the other top players.

Let’s take a look at the overall ratings of those hosts plus their WordPress optimization scores:

Company Rating WP optimization rating
Bluehost 3.3 3.3
DreamHost 4.1 3.1
SiteGround 4.6 3.9
Avg. for all companies Rating WP optimization rating
4.3 3.7
Company Rating WP optimization rating
GoDaddy 3.5 3.2
Cloudways 4.5 4.2
WPEngine 4.4 4.9
HostGator 3.7 3.1
Kinsta 4.8 4.8
Flywheel 4.6 4.9

Those results are kind of surprising, if I’m honest. The average WordPress optimization rating is at 3.7, which means that of the WordPress-approved companies, only SiteGround manages to beat it, and even that by only a small margin (+0.2).

Maybe it’s time for WordPress.org to start recommending companies that actual real users report to be better suited to handle the WordPress platform, who knows… What do you think?

On the overall scale, we also have to give it to WPEngine and Flywheel, which lead the pack, both rated at 4.9 / 5.

You know what, let’s take the topic of WordPress optimization further and find out if the “WordPress hosting” label actually means anything. In other words, are hosts that call themselves “WordPress hosting” any better?

Are all “WordPress hosts” really “WordPress optimized”?

Because of how popular WordPress is, pretty much every major host has some type of plan marketed towards WordPress sites nowadays. We wanted to see if all “WordPress hosting” is the same when it comes to how our respondents answered questions about:

  • WordPress-specific optimizations
  • The WordPress-specific knowledge of a host’s support staff

Here’s how things shook out between hosts that:

  • Only host WordPress sites
  • Host all types of sites (but still have plans marketed towards WordPress users)
  • Market themselves as “managed” in some way (this third group overlaps with the first two groups)

Not all sites I run are WordPress and I like to keep everything together, so that leaves out companies like WPEngine, Pagely, Pantheon, etc.

User

This table shows the average of each host’s overall score – it is not weighted by the number of responses for each individual host:

Type of host WordPress optimization score Support WordPress-knowledge score
ONLY host WordPress sites 4.89 4.83
Host ALL types of sites 3.40 3.70
Use “managed” verbiage 4.41 4.43

So, according to our survey-takers’ experiences, it appears like managed WordPress hosts really do offer better WordPress-specific optimization and support. Beyond that, hosts that focus 100% on WordPress seem to have the best optimization and WordPress knowledge, even versus generic hosts that still advertise a “managed WordPress” plan.

Interested in seeing how well specific hosts optimize for WordPress? Below, you can see a complete breakdown by the most popular hosts in our WordPress hosting survey.

HostWordPress Optimization ScoreHow WordPress Proficient Is Support?Has WordPress Plan?Uses "Managed" Verbiage*?Only Hosts WordPress Sites?
WPEngine4.924.69YesYesYes
Flywheel4.884.76YesYesYes
Kinsta4.774.86YesYesYes
Cloudways4.244.00YesYesNo
SiteGround3.924.45YesYesNo
A2 Hosting3.363.54YesNo*No
Bluehost3.263.42YesNo*No
GoDaddy3.173.25YesYesNo
HostGator3.153.32YesNo*No
DreamHost3.113.86YesNo*No
InMotion3.003.78YesNo*No

* Some hosts have both “regular” WordPress plans and higher-tier managed WordPress plans. When that happened, we chose to mark the category as “No” but with an asterisk. That is, to get a “Yes,” a host must use “managed” verbiage on its most popular WordPress plan.

With the exception of SiteGround, none of the other “generic” hosts were rated over 3.36 when it comes to WordPress optimization, whereas all of the dedicated WordPress hosts scored above 4.75.

Most of my experience comes from a shared hosting plan. I have worked with clients on dedicated WordPress hosting and it is SO much friendlier than the standard shared hosting. Usually in-between the cost of a shared plan and a VPS plan. Totally worth it to spring for that upgrade if you are managing only one website.

InMotion User

Support is the weakest link of all good hosts. And the ones with good support don’t offer the most optimized hosting. Pick your poison.

User

Do you need to be a pro to work with your hosting plan?

We’ve already looked at whether our respondents consider themselves WordPress pros earlier on in this analysis, but now let’s look at a rather related survey question: “Do you need to be a pro to work with your hosting plan?”

We’re doing this to find out how much of that reported WordPress optimization of some hosts can be due to the users’ own comfort working with servers, etc.

Here’s what people say about their hosts:

Company You need to be a pro to use this You don’t need to be a pro
SiteGround 9.6% 51.8%
GoDaddy 10.7% 48.2%
Cloudways 13.2% 60.4%
WPEngine 2% 62.7%
HostGator 26.8% 46.3%
Bluehost 13.9% 47.2%
Kinsta 2.9% 60%
DreamHost 10% 46.7%
Flywheel 0% 76%
Digital Ocean 75% 16.7%

As you can see, most hosts are rated at “no need to be a pro,” with the exception of Digital Ocean, which has traditionally remained to be the toughest host to get started with.

Interestingly enough, HostGator has a relatively big number of people saying that the platform does require some level of proficiency with servers. Though, this might be a result of HostGator often reaching first-time hosting users, which has to have an impact on their opinions.

The most interesting thing about the current host was that after I created my agency account and moved my site to paid plan, they contacted me in person on Skype and actually offered free webinars so that I can build sites faster and make them faster. I have never heard of something like that before.

Pantheon User

Security – is that a thing?

Website security is a complex topic and there’s a lot more to it than just installing some compact security plugins. Frankly, if you want your website to be secure, hosting is where you need to start. Or, to say it another way, if your hosting is not secure, nothing else will matter.

Hence, we were curious as to what users think about the level of security that their hosts give them. Here’s what we found:

Are you happy with how your host takes care of your website security?
Company I don’t know what they do No, I am not! Yes, I’m happy!
SiteGround 13.3% 1.5% 83%
GoDaddy 37.5% 19.6% 41.1%
Cloudways 24.5% 1.9% 73.6%
WPEngine 5.9% 3.9% 90.2%
HostGator 43.9% 14.6% 41.5%
Bluehost 27.8% 30.6% 38.9%
Kinsta 5.7% 94.3%
DreamHost 30% 10% 56.7%
Flywheel 4% 8% 88%

First off, the more “specialized” the host, the more aware their users are about the host’s security features.

WPEngine has only 5.9% of users admitting that they don’t know what the host does in terms of security; Kinsta – 5.6%; Flywheel – 4%. Users of those hosts are also happier with the security they’re getting.

The leader here is Kinsta at 94.3% and WPEngine at 90.2%. We also have to recognize SiteGround at 83% with only 1.5% of users saying they’re not happy with the platform’s security.

The default security add-ins that serve as a launchpad to sell you expensive security options seem to be a new trend with many of the hosts. It is creating a lot of confusion, dissatisfaction and technical problems. Example: Many sites now go down every time the SSL certificate renews, even with default setups; the host has no solution at this time.

User

Faster hosting doesn’t necessarily mean a higher rating

If you’re a WordPress pro, it’s easy to fall into this trap of thinking that speed is all that matters when it comes to a web host. But when we compared our own performance tests to the overall rating of survey respondents, we struggled to notice any strong correlation between the two:

HostAvg. Page Load Time (s)Overall Rating
GoDaddy0.453.46
InMotion Hosting0.624.19
SiteGround0.744.56
DreamHost0.844.1
Bluehost0.933.25
WPEngine0.944.41
A2 Hosting0.963.83
HostGator1.353.66

Possible reasons for this lack of correlation could be:

  • A lot of users don’t really care about page load times unless they’re really bad.
  • Our test data isn’t put under scale, so differences might not become apparent until a site gets more traffic.

(Hosts) should be transparent about what you provide for the cost including the tech specs of the server CPU, RAM etc. That’s how we know how better the performance will be. Just saying ‘double/faster’ performance on this expensive plan does not make sense.

User

I wish there was more information available on how to evaluate the technical specs in terms a non-expert cold understand. It’s hard to know what I need and what I don’t.

User

No correlation between uptime and perceived reliability (at least not yet!)

First, let’s look into who’s the most reliable host in our survey vs the 2016 survey data:

Company2016 reliability rating2018 reliability ratingDifference
SiteGround4.74.6-0.1
GoDaddy3.83.7-0.1
WPEngine4.54.80.3
HostGator4.14-0.1
Bluehost3.43.50.1
Kinsta4.94.8-0.1
DreamHost4.34.1-0.2
Flywheel4.84.7-0.1

WPEngine and Kinsta take the win here, with WPEngine improving by 0.3 ratings points compared to two years ago. However, you might want to read this or that about our own experience with Kinsta’s reliability.

The mainstream hosting companies sit towards the bottom of the table, which was expected considering higher expectations from pro users.

But that’s not everything on the topic of reliability!

Now that we’ve started publicly tracking uptime statistics for popular WordPress hosts, we were interested to see whether there was any correlation between our uptime data and how survey respondents ranked each host’s reliability.

Well – spoiler – we didn’t notice any consistent connection (at least not yet).

Of the hosts that we’re tracking, the two with the highest reliability scores – WPEngine and SiteGround – do indeed have great uptime.

But at the lower end of the table, the data gets a bit murkier.

For example, so far InMotion Hosting is the worst-performing host that we’re tracking. Its 99.55% uptime correlates to more than 39 hours of downtime over an entire year. But despite that, InMotion Hosting still had a higher reliability rating than HostGator and Bluehost which are, so far, sporting a perfect 100% uptime (that’s equal to WPEngine).

Our uptime tracking data is still fairly young, though, so it will be interesting to see if our uptime data tracks closer to our survey data over the course of an entire year.

HostUptime (last 75 days)Down hours / yearReliablity Score
WPEngine100%04.8
SiteGround99.98%1.74.6
InMotion Hosting99.55%39.44.1
HostGator100%03.9
A2 Hosting99.78%19.33.9
GoDaddy*99.93%6.13.7
Bluehost*100%03.5

* Uptime data for the last 60 days.

“Premium” hosts do indeed offer better support

In this section, we’ll compare how popular hosts’ support teams fared in our WordPress hosting survey via two numbers:

  • Overall support rating
  • WordPress-proficiency rating for support
Host Overall support WP-specific support
Kinsta 4.9 4.9
WPEngine 4.7 4.7
SiteGround 4.7 4.5
Flywheel 4.6 4.8
InMotion 4.2 3.8
Cloudways 4.1 4.0
DreamHost 4.0 3.9
HostGator 3.7 3.3
A2 Hosting 3.7 3.6
GoDaddy 3.3 3.3
Bluehost 3.2 3.4
Digital Ocean 3.0 3.0

As a general trend, you’ll notice that many of the more premium managed WordPress hosts – like Kinsta or WPEngine – scored highly in both categories, while most budget shared hosts sit towards the bottom of the list.

There are some outliers – like SiteGround – but that’s generally how things shake out.

Of course, this conclusion isn’t really mind-blowing – it certainly makes sense that paying for a premium host gets you better support. But it’s always nice to get confirmation that the extra money really is worth it!

Oh, and shame on you, Digital Ocean. Though, we get that … DO is meant for the pros anyway, so you’re expected to be your own support, right? 🙂

While features will vary, the quality of support provided by humans is the main difference I’ve found in hosts.

SiteGround User

It’s good to contact support at least once to see how they respond. Don’t wait until you REALLY have a big problem. Get to know them as soon as possible.

User

⏮️ “Tell us about your previous host”

For me, this has been the most exciting part of the whole WordPress hosting survey analysis!

While getting to know what people think of their current hosts is interesting for sure, it’s also kind of expected to see mostly positive ratings. After all, why would you stay with a host that you dislike?

However, once we start looking into people’s previous hosts, this is where we can get some cool insights. Starting with:

Who’s the most changed-from host?

Those are the hosts that people generally get tired of after a while and decide to ditch for whatever reason.

Who was your previous host? # of users switched from it How would you rate it?
GoDaddy 124 2.5
HostGator 86 2.6
Bluehost 68 2.5
SiteGround 55 3.1
WPEngine 35 3.0
DreamHost 19 2.9
A2 Hosting 18 3.1

The average rating for all changed-from companies is 2.7 / 5.

As you would expect, those changed-from ratings are on the low side. All of the big three – GoDaddy, Bluehost, Hostgator – have ratings in the range of 2.5-2.6. Among the rest, we have SiteGround, WPEngine, and A2 that have managed to score 3.0-3.1.

Overall ratings vs changing-from ratings

Now let’s compare the hosts’ current ratings vs ratings given to them by users who have moved on.

CompanyChanged-from ratingCurrent ratingDifference
SiteGround3.14.6-1,5
GoDaddy2.53.5-1
WPEngine34.4-1.4
HostGator2.63.7-1.1
Bluehost2.53.3-0.8
DreamHost2.94.1-1.2
A2 Hosting3.13.8-0.7

If I were to give you my personal opinion on this, I’d say that if you’re looking for a new host, you should probably narrow it down to the companies that even their past users say are “okay.”

WordPress hosting vs experienced users

Another thing we wanted to look at is whether a user’s experience with other hosting companies has any impact on how they rate their current hosts.

This table presents the overall ratings based on how experienced with hosting the respondents are:

How many hosting companies have you used prior to this one?
Company My first time 1-2 3-5 6-10 10+ Average
SiteGround 4.8 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.4 4.6
GoDaddy 3.8 3.4 3.5 2.7 3.5
Cloudways 4.7 4.6 4.3 4.0 4.5
WPEngine 4.5 4.5 4.5 4.3 5.0 4.4
Average for all companies 3.9 4.3 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.3

Interestingly, it turns out that people for whom it’s their first hosting experience rate their providers 9.3% lower than everyone else. Furthermore, the more experience you have, the higher you’ll rate your current host.

Lastly, among the users with more hosting experience, SiteGround and Cloudways received the top ratings.

In our opinion, this is not necessarily because the companies chosen by first-timers are bad (all of them got better rankings from experienced users), but perhaps beginners have overall higher expectations. What do you think of this?

🎓 Conclusions?

Okay, with all this data behind us, let’s try to keep this part quick!

  • Overall, the hugest hosting companies of them all you should probably stay clear of. Bluehost, HostGator, GoDaddy – they don’t have the best ratings across all the metrics we checked.
  • If you’re going for a managed hosting solution, you’re most likely going to be the happiest with WPEngine, Kinsta, Cloudways.
  • If you’re a hosting pro and know what you’re doing (server management, shell, whatnots), Digital Ocean is still an awesome pick.

As for the top overall host, we have to give it to SiteGround. They have the highest number of survey entries, and they’re in the top 2 rating-wise. They also look really solid across all the other metrics we checked. If I haven’t missed anything crucial here, there are no significant chinks in SiteGround’s armor based on the data we have.

More?

I’m sure there are many more gems to find in this data set, but I, personally, am all out at this point. 🙂 So now it’s over to you.

As mentioned at the beginning, we are making the raw CSV file available for download, so please feel free to take it and use it for your own analysis. (Don’t forget to let us know if you publish anything based on the data!)

Once again, we want to thank you all for taking part in this WordPress hosting survey! You rock! 🎸

2017 WordPress hosting survey results

 Audience: casual WordPress users. Number of respondents: 4,750+. 

Something that’s not a mystery here, and hasn’t been ever, is that we like our managed hosting plan at Kinsta quite a bit. It works, keeps things fast, overall … great! We even reviewed it here.

That being said, the way we host our sites and the way most “WordPress insiders” host theirs, isn’t at all what casual users do.

As it turns out, most people host with GoDaddy, Bluehost, and HostGator. And you know what? … They’re loving it!

(At least that’s what they say.)

We’ve just concluded our 2017 WordPress hosting survey, and the results are quite stunning, or highly interesting, to say the least.

What hosting company do you use?

Here’s what people say when asked two simple questions: “What hosting company do you use?” and “How likely are you to recommend it?”

Top rated mainstream WordPress hosting companies
Host Rating Votes
HostGator 8.02 / 10 456
Bluehost 7.93 / 10 450
GoDaddy 7.64 / 10 734

We’ve had more than 4,750 valid answers in this 2017 WordPress hosting survey, and these three companies have gathered the most votes by far. And, as you can see, the people using these platforms seem to be very happy with what they’re getting.

Of course, the survey wasn’t only about GoDaddy, Bluehost, and HostGator. The respondents actually mentioned more than 1,000(!) different hosting companies. More on that in a minute.

But first, why do we even keep doing these surveys?

Hosting is very close to our hearts – as weird as this might sound.

First of all, hosting is always the first step in everyone’s adventure with WordPress. And yes, while you can play around with the platform to some extent locally, it’s not until you get your hands on an actual web server that you can really start doing something significant with it.

Secondly, hosting recommendations are something that we do quite often. Not only on this blog, but also whenever our customers ask about this over at ThemeIsle. And while doing so, we want to make sure that we’re on point with the situation that’s actually in the market.

In other words, we want to be sure that we’re recommending all the right stuff – products and services – that will bring our users value rather than trouble.

This also becomes crucially important when you factor in the fact that we have affiliate links for hosting on this site, which puts us in the spotlight whenever we decide to recommend anything. We just can’t afford to guide people towards a sub-par solution (like the site described here allegedly does), since this would shatter our reputation. That’s why we need to keep researching the hosting market constantly.

At the same time, testing hosts on our own (via performance experiments, ongoing speed tests, etc.) only goes so far. In order to learn how happy people actually are with their hosting setups, you need to ask them directly. This is where the 2017 WordPress hosting survey comes into play.

And those surveys can sometimes be very revealing, and show you things that you didn’t expect to see. Much like it has happened this time:

Let’s start dissecting the survey findings one by one … first, the elephant in the room:

GoDaddy is a silent giant in WordPress hosting

GoDaddy is not a big name inside the WordPress hosting “bubble”. Try to recommend GoDaddy as a host and you’re liable to get at least a few comments like these:

GoDaddy recommendation

That’s why it’s so surprising that GoDaddy was, by far, the most popular host in our 2017 WordPress hosting survey.

GoDaddy accounted for a whopping 15.3% of all responses. The next most popular hosts were HostGator and Bluehost, far behind at 9.5% and 9.4%, respectively.

This is not a full list of hosts – just the most popular responses.

And guess what? Not only are WordPress users using GoDaddy … they’re actually pretty dang happy.

While not the highest recommendation score in our survey, GoDaddy clocked in at a respectable 7.64 average on our recommendation scale.

In the end, I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised at GoDaddy’s popularity. While it’s not on most “best WordPress hosting” lists, the company has been snapping up WordPress properties at a rapid pace.

In the past months, GoDaddy has bought up WP Curve, ManageWP, and Sucuri, aiming to become a one-stop shop for WordPress users.

Don’t sleep on GoDaddy – while its users aren’t as likely to recommend it as SiteGround (8.56) or Dreamhost (8.66), GoDaddy still has a ton of hosting customers who are happy with its service.

About that willingness to recommend:

Net Promoter Scores of the top WordPress hosting companies

Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is a very cool metric designed to somehow gauge how happy people are with a brand or product, up to the point where they are willing to recommend it to their peers.

Here’s a better definition:

The Net Promoter Score is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others.

So since we do have a sample size that allows us to start getting into the NPS stuff, let’s see how the numbers play out for some of our featured hosts – in particular, the ones that have gathered more than 80 total entries.

Before that, though. One quick disclaimer. This data is interesting and gives a rough picture, but don’t take it as absolute gospel. We don’t have the proper representative sample to truly calculate each company’s real NPS. Most relevant to our survey is the fact that a sizable portion of detractors (people who scored towards the 0 end) likely wouldn’t have responded to our survey because they’d already have moved onto other hosts.

For that reason, there’s a decent chance that our measurement skews a little high.

Okay, here’s the data:

The Net Promoter Score of the most popular WordPress hosting companies
Host NPS
SiteGround 46.15
HostGator 29.32
Bluehost 23.81
Hostinger 18.42
GoDaddy 14.76
1&1 0

As you can see, SiteGround is still the company that’s the most likely to be recommended, however, the numbers scored by HostGator are not too shabby at all.

Just for context, according to data, Mailchimp has an NPS of 50. And it’s generally regarded that any score above 0 should be considered “good,” while 50 and above is “excellent.” (Although some experts disagree on whether 0 is actually “good” or not.)

But does that mean that SiteGround is better than Bluehost in the eyes of the users? Well, not necessarily. It’s been argued over the years that NPS metrics can be highly dependent on the type of the customer that a given brand reaches in the first place. For instance, brands that cater to more wealthy customers tend to be rated more highly as well. A similar thing might be occurring when comparing companies catering to casual users vs catering to a more specialized crowd.

People are generally happy with their hosting

The average rating given by the respondents was 7.7 / 10.

Meaning that people are generally very happy with what they have.

Here’s a more detailed look per hosting company:

WordPress hosting companies as rated by users
Host Votes Rating
GoDaddy 734 7.64
HostGator 456 8.02
Bluehost 450 7.93
WordPress 215 7.14
SiteGround 178 8.56
1&1 102 7.42
Hostinger 86 7.58
One.com 71 7.84
Namecheap 64 8.04
iPage 62 7.75
ehost 58 7.07
DreamHost 56 8.66
InMotion 52 8.11

For the above table, we’ve only decided to feature the companies that got more than 50 entries. We needed to narrow it down since our respondents listed more than 1000 different hosting companies, many of them mentioned only once.

(If you want to get the full data set, there’s a raw-data export file at the bottom.)

There’s something interesting in the table above, if you’ve noticed it:

Is “WordPress” a host?

A lot of people said that “WordPress” is their host.

Unfortunately, we don’t know if what they mean is WordPress.com or if they confuse what a host actually is.

We’ve also had a number of people pointing out “cPanel” as their host, and so on.

“Who’s your host?” # of answers
“WordPress” 215
“cPanel” 11
“I don’t know” 13

Perhaps what this proves more than anything else is how confusing the whole idea of hosting really is.

As pros, I believe that we absolutely can’t neglect the fact that WordPress isn’t as simple of a tool as we like to believe it is. Educating other casual users is key to helping them understand the platform and how to get the most out of it.

With WordPress running on nearly 30% of all websites, it’s not surprising that a lot of users don’t have any knowledge nor even interest in understanding the platform’s inner workings, or what makes one host better than the other.

Many casual users simply shop based on the price or based on the marketing messages that they see on the web/TV. Many of them don’t even assume that one host might be slower or less reliable than the other.

So this brings me to the next thing that we wanted to find out in the 2017 WordPress hosting survey:

Performance and satisfaction aren’t as linked as you might think

One of the things that surprised us was that hosts that many WordPress insiders disparage still had solid scores when it came to likelihood to recommend.

This had us wondering, “what’s the disconnect between WordPress insiders and regular WordPress users?”

Does a host’s performance actually affect the likelihood of a user recommending the host? Or is there something else at play here?

Let’s find out by comparing the results of our 2017 WordPress hosting survey with some of our own performance testing data for popular hosts.

Hosting performance vs user rating
Host Load time – NYC test User rating
SiteGround 0.645 seconds 8.56
Bluehost 2.00 seconds 7.93
HostGator 0.75 seconds 8.02
InMotion 0.46 seconds 8.11
A2 Hosting 0.48 seconds 8.63

You can see a slight pattern where the hosts with lower page load times are more highly recommended. But we’re not sure the difference is large enough to warrant any dramatic conclusions.

This leads us to believe that performance is not necessarily the first thing on the minds of average WordPress users.

Our 2017 WordPress hosting survey didn’t ask users to rank what they thought was most important about their host, but some postulations are:

  • Ease of getting WordPress up and running
  • How often there’s a “fire” that needs to be put out (i.e. users just want something that “works”, even if it’s not the fastest)
  • How helpful/available support is

This is a worthy area to dig into in the future. And it’s good reminder for power users to remember that the features that WordPress insiders value in a host aren’t necessarily the same as those that casual users value.

This is the part of the 2017 WordPress hosting survey that we’ve been really interested in.

The US market is kind of predictable in terms of who’s going to be popular. I mean, all those Super Bowl ads have to account for something, right, GoDaddy?

But what about the international markets? Is GoDaddy just as popular in, say, Germany as it is in the US? Let’s see.

Out of 4,750+ answers (making this the largest WordPress hosting survey to date), only around 25.7% come from the US, which makes the large majority international.

Here are the top 10 countries and their most popular hosting companies:

Most popular WordPress hosting companies by country
Country % of entires Most popular host
USA 25.7% GoDaddy
India 15.48% GoDaddy
United Kingdom 6.243% GoDaddy
Nigeria 3.634% WhoGoHost.com
Canada 3.305% GoDaddy
Indonesia 2.377% Dewaweb
Pakistan 2.203% GoDaddy
South Africa 2.184% Afrihost
Germany 2.126% 1&1
Australia 1.971% GoDaddy

Or, for a more interactive presentation (click on a country):

But that’s not the end of the story in terms of the international WordPress hosting market:

Hosters worldwide are just about equally satisfied

Most hosts market internationally nowadays, and it’s fairly common for hosts to at least offer data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia.

While that’s true, most major hosts on our list are still headquartered in the USA. This led us to wonder, “are hosts managing to connect with international customers as well as customers from the USA?”

To try to get a gauge on international opinion, we divided responses for our top four hosts by USA and non-USA users.

Host Non-US Votes Non-US Rating US Votes US Rating
SiteGround 111 8.33 67 8.93
HostGator 289 7.98 167 8.07
Bluehost 212 7.96 238 7.91
GoDaddy 460 7.55 274 7.79

With the exception of Bluehost, US respondents were slightly more likely to recommend their host than international respondents. With that being said, the differences aren’t large enough for us to declare statistical significance.

Without higher sample sizes, we can only say that customers around the world all seem to be fairly evenly happy with their host.

Hosts that are part of the Endurance International Group

As you may know, EIG is one of the biggest hosting companies in the market and one of the most successful ones at that. However, for the most part, they’ve remained somewhat in the background and don’t market themselves in the open at all.

They achieved their success by acquiring a large number of other hosting companies and then letting them operate under their original brand names.

This practice – of acquiring companies and then optimizing their infrastructure for profit – doesn’t always sit well with some users.

Naturally, we wanted to see how EIG companies stand in our 2017 WordPress hosting survey. Here’s what we found:

EIG hosting companies as rated by users
Host Votes Rating
HostGator 456 8.02
Bluehost 450 7.93
iPage 62 7.75
ehost 58 7.07
FatCow 13 8.18
HostMonster 13 7.27
Just Host 12 7.40
Arvixe 11 6.80

The table above features only the companies that got at least 10 mentions.

You be the one to interpret.

The main differences vs our previous hosting survey

If you’ve been paying attention to what we’re publishing here on the blog (no hard feelings if not 😉) then you might have noticed some of our previous WordPress hosting surveys.

Those were a bit different.

First of all, they were done in an entirely different way than this one:

  • There were a lot more questions.
  • They were promoted to the community of WordPress insiders – mainly via the advanced WordPress groups on Facebook and elsewhere. Moreover, 80% of the survey respondents actually identified themselves as WordPress pros.

This 2017 survey, on the other hand, was performed via small pop-up messages that we displayed to our visitors here at CodeinWP.com, and also ThemeIsle.com and JustFreeThemes.com.

The 2017 WordPress hosting survey wasn’t promoted directly. However, since the collective audience of those sites is more casual, with the pros only being part of it, the answers reflect that quite a lot.

The first main difference is the aforementioned popularity of the mainstream companies like GoDaddy, Bluehost, and HostGator, and their overall very good ratings.

The other difference is a low number of answers for more expensive, managed WordPress hosting plans. This 2017 survey had nearly 10x more respondents, yet there were only 3 mentions of Kinsta.

More?

We are making the raw CSV file available for download, so please feel free to take it and use it for your own analysis. Don’t forget to let us know if you find anything interesting!

2016 WordPress hosting survey results

 Audience: pro WordPress users. Number of respondents: 500+. 

Things we wanted to learn

As you would have expected, the no.1 goal was to name the top recommended hosting company for WordPress.

But we were also after the fine details of the whole hosting experience, such as:

  • how WordPress-optimized these WordPress hosting companies actually are,
  • how reliable they are,
  • how WordPress-savvy the support is,
  • what’s people’s experience with web hosting in general,
  • how much money people spend on hosting every month,
  • how happy people are with the value they’re getting for the money,
  • what’s the average time they have been with their current hosting company,
  • how many sites people are hosting,
  • do people host their own sites vs sites of their clients’,
  • what traffic those sites attract,
  • what types of sites people usually host,
  • how user-friendly the hosting platforms are overall,
  • and most importantly, how likely people are to extend when their subscription is up for renewal.

The survey respondents

The audience our blogs attract is more on the pro side of the spectrum. For instance, 80% of the survey respondents identify themselves as WordPress pros (developers, designers, experts, people otherwise knowledgeable about WordPress), and this means that their opinion of certain web hosts might be different than what the overall population would say.

But that’s a good thing. WordPress pros is essentially the group that drives the movement in this space forward, and the people whom everyone else asks for advice when looking for the best host for their sites.

Okay, onto the fun stuff!

Top rated WordPress hosting companies

Here are the top rated WordPress hosting companies according to our 506 survey respondents:

CompanyRatingAvg. $ / month# of entries
Kinsta4.9$184.6015
Flywheel4.7$77.8615
SiteGround4.6$27.4375
DigitalOcean4.6$46.7736
DreamHost4.3$25.4618
WP Engine4.2$184.1227
HostGator3.7$17.1140
GoDaddy3.5$10.0638
Bluehost3.0$23.2738
* The hosting companies with the least number of entries have not been included.

Setting the ratings themselves aside (we’ll talk about those in a minute), as you can see, we did get very different numbers of entries for each company. Please take this into consideration when interpreting the results for yourself. What this basically means is that those ratings don’t all carry the same weight.

The second conclusion is that the pro WordPress crowd that this survey reached is much more likely to use SiteGround (14.8% of all entires) than anything else, even though SiteGround is not the overall biggest company in this lineup.

For example, here’s a quick Google Trends comparison, which isn’t a perfect metric, but still gives us a good overview of how popular these companies actually are compared to one another:

Number of entries: SiteGround (75), HostGator (40), GoDaddy and Bluehost (38).

google-trends-1 on WordPress hosting

And when we add GoDaddy to the mix:

google-trends-2 on WordPress hosting

(Although we need to be careful here because GoDaddy is much more than a hosting company.)

Considering that HostGator and Bluehost are 5x (ish) bigger than SiteGround, it’s really impressive that they have still managed to get nearly double the entries.

How happy people are with their hosting

A very general conclusion when looking at the data is that, overall, people are very happy with their current hosts:

78% of the respondents rate their hosting providers at 4 or higher. Also, 87% would recommend their host to other people.

That being said, 35% of the respondents, if they had more money to spare, they would choose another hosting platform. When asked which platform that would be, 21% of them say WP Engine.

But hold on, that’s not the best part…

It turns out that there are actually more people who would like to move to WP Engine, than people who are currently using it. 30% more, in fact.

What about the WordPress.org-approved hosts?

A couple of months ago, there was this huge news story that WordPress.org finally updated their recommended hosting page. This got picked up by some major news outlets in the niche (here and here, for example), and was subject to serious controversy regarding how/why certain companies found their spot on this list.

TL;DR: For what seemed like decades, WordPress.org only recommended people to use Bluehost. After the update, the official hosting page also features DreamHost, Flywheel, and SiteGround.

It just so happens that all of those companies have been rated and talked about in our survey, so let’s now see how they stack up against each other and the other players.

Here’s some basic data from our respondents:

Company Rating (# of entries) Avg. months w/ host
Flywheel 4.7 (15) 12.3
SiteGround 4.6 (75) 15.8
DreamHost 4.3 (18) 69.3
Bluehost 3.0 (38) 31.4
Avg. for all companies Rating Avg. months w/ host
4.2 26.8
Company Rating (# of entries) Avg. months w/ host
Kinsta 4.9 (15) 11.4
DigitalOcean 4.6 (36) 14.7
InMotion 4.3 (11) 14.9
WPEngine 4.2 (27) 15.6
Media Temple 4.2 (12) 43.9
Namecheap 4.1 (9) 16.9
HostGator 3.7 (40) 46.3
GoDaddy 3.5 (38) 29.9

The thing we see right away is that the addition of those three new companies was probably a very good move. Bluehost – formerly the only recommended company – received the lowest rating of them all, while the three new companies are basically among the best in the market. (Although, please consider the relatively low number of answers for both Flywheel and DreamHost.)

Bluehost used to be good for hosting sites, but since they were bought by EIG they have totally gone down hill. I am moving my clients to SiteGround.

User

On the overall scale, we also have to give it to Kinsta that leads the pack, and DigitalOcean, which hasn’t marketed themselves as WordPress-friendly ever (nor are they).

(Also, as you can see above, on the average, our respondents have been with their current hosting providers for 26.8 months.)

The next thing we can take a look at is perhaps the most telling piece of data of them all – how likely people are to extend when their subscription is up for renewal. Here’s what’s up:

WordPress.org-approved companies How likely are you to extend?
DreamHost 94%
SiteGround 93%
Flywheel 93%
Bluehost 46%
Overall for all companies 85%
Other companies How likely are you to extend?
Kinsta 100%
InMotion 100%
DigitalOcean 97%
WPEngine 92%
Media Temple 92%
GoDaddy 78%
Namecheap 78%
HostGator 74%

Bluehost really doesn’t look good here, with only 46% of our respondents willing to extend. The other three companies, on the other hand, basically lead the whole pack once again.

Looking at all companies, Kinsta and InMotion both get a 100% rating here, which is impressive, although their data samples are smaller.

Now, since it’s WordPress hosting we’re talking about, we should probably mention WordPress optimization and how WordPress-proficient the support teams are:

In bold – WordPress.org-approved hosts

CompanyWordPress-optimized?Support WordPress-proficient?
Bluehost2.62.9
DigitalOcean2.73.3
DreamHost3.34.3
Flywheel4.94.9
GoDaddy2.63.1
HostGator2.43.0
Kinsta4.94.9
SiteGround4.04.5
WPEngine4.74.5

This time, it’s Flywheel and SiteGround that come on top when looking at the hosts recommended by WordPress.org. Overall, we also have to give it to Kinsta and WP Engine.

On the other end, we have the usual … Bluehost.

In general, the ratings around WordPress optimization are not massively high, and the leaders really stand out from the rest. Setting aside the optimizations themselves, marketing also must play a huge role here. All of WP Engine, Flywheel, Kinsta, and SiteGround market some WordPress-specific plans and solutions, which probably has its impact on the perceived value too.

Now, while the perceived WordPress-optimization can be impacted by things like marketing, the level of support quality shouldn’t have this problem. Taking that into account, another interesting angle we can take here is to have a look at any relation of price vs how WordPress-proficient the support team is. It’s reasonable to expect higher prices in exchange for more WordPress expertise.

Here are the average monthly costs in relation to support quality:

How WordPress-proficient is the support team?
1 2 3 4 5
$23.11 $21.44 $29.72 $60.48 $67.06

It seems that a higher level of WordPress support indeed proves to be more expensive.

WordPress hosting vs experienced users

Here’s a general table focusing on how many hosting companies the respondents have used prior to their current one:

In bold – WordPress.org-approved hosts

How many hosting companies have you used prior to this one?
Company My first time 2 3…5 6…10 10…
Bluehost 9 12 10 5
DigitalOcean 1 5 19 8 3
DreamHost 2 7 7 2
Flywheel 3 6 5 1
GoDaddy 11 12 12 3
HostGator 8 12 15 4 1
InMotion 2 5 2 2
Kinsta 8 6 1
Media Temple 2 5 4 1
Namecheap 2 2 5
SiteGround 1 17 41 13 3
WPEngine 3 5 11 5 3
other 16 44 74 29 9
Total 55 (10.9%) 126 (24.9%) 215 (42.5%) 86 (17.0%) 22 (4.3%)

When we analyze this some more, and normalize the data, it turns out that Bluehost is 2.2x times more popular among first-time hosting users compared to the average numbers. (Specifically, first-time users are 10.9% of all users. With Bluehost, though, first-timers are 23.7%.)

On the flip side, SiteGround attracts almost no first-timers at all, and 54.7% of their users are people who have been with 3-5 hosts before.

When we look at all the companies overall, GoDaddy is ranking even higher among first-timers – getting 2.7x times more such users than the reference value. After all, they do try to sell their hosting to whoever buys a domain name from them.

It was also interesting to see that people for whom it’s their first hosting experience rated their providers 17% lower than everyone else. In our opinion, this is not necessarily because the companies chosen by first-timers are bad (all of them got better rankings from experienced users), but perhaps beginners have overall higher expectations. (What do you think about this?)

Taking all of our survey entries into account, 11% of people are first-timers to hosting, 64% have tested 3 or more companies.

Ratings based on how experienced with hosting the respondents are (included are only the companies we have the most data for):

How many hosting companies have you used prior to this one?
Company My first time 2 3…5 6…10 10… Average
Bluehost 3.3 3.2 3.0 3.0 3.0
GoDaddy 2.9 3.8 3.9 3.0 3.5
HostGator 3.4 3.9 3.9 3.8 2.0 3.7
SiteGround 5.0 4.8 4.5 4.5 4.7 4.6
Average for all companies 3.4 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.2

Lastly, let’s look at how many people consider themselves WordPress pros based on which company they use:

Are you a WordPress pro?
Company Yes No
Flywheel 93% 7%
DreamHost 89% 11%
SiteGround 80% 20%
Bluehost 79% 21%
Are you a WordPress pro? Yes No
Total 80% 20%
Are you a WordPress pro?
Company Yes No
DigitalOcean 94% 6%
Media Temple 92% 8%
WPEngine 85% 15%
InMotion 82% 18%
other 82% 18%
HostGator 75% 25%
Kinsta 67% 33%
Namecheap 67% 33%
GoDaddy 61% 39%

Looking past the four recommended WordPress.org hosts, we have to acknowledge DigitalOcean, which leads this ranking. That score isn’t surprising due to the difficult setup process and management with DigitalOcean servers.

How much money people pay for their WordPress hosting

Collectively, our respondents spend $23,830.11 on hosting every month.

Here’s the distribution across the top 4 companies with the most entries, and the total numbers for all:

$ / month
Company < $5 $5-$10 $10-$15 $15-$30 $30-$50 $50-$100 > $100
Bluehost 6% 27% 24% 24% 9% 6% 3%
GoDaddy 15% 47% 24% 12% 3%
HostGator 8% 31% 19% 22% 14% 6%
SiteGround 8% 21% 23% 27% 4% 11% 5%
Average for all companies 12% 27% 15% 18% 9% 9% 10%

I tried WPEngine earlier, but as my sites have high traffic my bill increased from month to month. Especially that they are still counting bot traffic. If you are with WPE at least triple your visitors according to Google Analytics and select a plan based on this data.

User

We also asked our respondents how happy they were with the value they’re getting for their money. Here’s what they said:

DigitalOcean 4.6
DreamHost 4.4
Kinsta 4.3
SiteGround 4.2
other 4.1
Flywheel 4.1
Namecheap 3.9
HostGator 3.9
InMotion 3.8
WPEngine 3.7
Media Temple 3.5
GoDaddy 3.4
Bluehost 3.0
Total 4.0

DigitalOcean rules here, but it’s really no surprise. They are certainly one of the most affordable solutions out there, and the only downside is that you need to be quite savvy to use their platform.

One more interesting finding is that people who host sites for clients pay 1.7x times more for hosting than those who host only their own sites. And not only that, but they also stay 1.5x times longer with their web host:

Hosting mainly your own sites vs for clients? How long have you been on this hosting plan? What’s the cost of your hosting plan / month?
Clients 32.0 months $61.21
Just me 20.8 months $36.62

Tip. If you promote any hosting offers as an affiliate, and bring mostly this type of clients, then you should probably ask for a commission increase…

How many sites people host

This is yet another interesting piece of data, and we were actually quite surprised to see the results here.

First off, the total number of websites hosted among our respondents is 6,215. Wow!

Some more detail:

Hosting mainly your own sites vs for clients? Clients Just me Total
Average 18 6 12
Adjusted average * 14 6 10
Median 8 3 5
* Adjusted by removing a handful of the most extreme values from the data set.

We certainly didn’t expect to see the numbers being that high. Even if we look just at the median, 5 sites is a huge number!

Also, it’s quite expected that people hosting sites for clients will report higher numbers here. On the average, those users have around 2.5x times more sites hosted with their providers.

Next, let’s have a look at the types of sites that people host:

  • Most popular type of sites: Business websites (389 entries).
  • Personal websites / portfolios – 32% less popular (265 entries).
  • E-commerce stores – 42% less popular (226 entries).
  • Classic blogs – 45% less popular (213 entries).
  • Online magazines – 72% less popular (107 entries).

Also, the most popular traffic segments for each of the top companies:

CompanyTraffic*% of users
GoDaddy0-2,00055%
Kinsta100,000-1M33%
WPEngine10,000-50,00026%
BlueHost0-2,00032%
DigitalOcean2,000-5,00028%
DreamHost0-2,00039%
Flywheel2,000-5,00027%
HostGator0-2,00045%
InMotion0-2,00045%
Media Temple10,000-50,00033%
Namecheap0-2,00044%
SiteGround0-2,00032%
* visitors / month

For a site with over daily 2000 visits, or if you are selling something, you should not host in shared hosting. Use VPS, or Cloud, managed or self-managed depending on your skill-set.

User

Most reliable WordPress hosts and most user-friendly ones

Here’s the reliability rank according to our respondents:

Kinsta 4.9
Flywheel 4.8
DigitalOcean 4.7
SiteGround 4.7
WPEngine 4.5
Media Temple 4.4
other 4.4
InMotion 4.4
DreamHost 4.3
Namecheap 4.1
HostGator 4.1
GoDaddy 3.8
Bluehost 3.4
Total 4.3

And here’s the user-friendliness rank:

Flywheel 4.5
Kinsta 4.3
DreamHost 4.2
WPEngine 3.8
SiteGround 3.7
GoDaddy 3.6
InMotion 3.6
other 3.5
Media Temple 3.4
Namecheap 3.3
HostGator 3.2
Bluehost 3.0
DigitalOcean 2.7
Total 3.5

Flywheel and Kinsta came very high on both of these lists, with SiteGround doing very well too.

DigitalOcean has a top 3 reliability rank, but they’re also dead last when it comes to user-friendliness, which is very expected in their case. (Please don’t get me wrong here. DigitalOcean is great, but, as I mentioned, you need to be experienced enough to use their platform.)

Some fine details about the 2016 survey

  • In total, we’ve had 506 valid survey entries.
  • We got those entries by asking our partners to participate (thanks again!), mentioning it to our newsletter list and our customers, as well as promoting the survey through ads (standard and retargeting). In total, we spent around $3,000 to get this survey to everybody, like Ionut shared in the latest transparency report.
  • The survey itself has been in the making since April 18th, which was the date of the first Redbooth post of ours detailing the project. Since then, it went through multiple iterations … brainstorming the questions, getting feedback, and making sure that everything goes smoothly.
  • No hosting company has been asked to participate in any way when the survey was going on. We also had an eye out for any suspicious entries that might come from people wanting to skew the results (not that anyone would do such a thing, of course).

What does all this mean for us?

Overall, you can probably agree that the community of WordPress insiders has been rather hostile towards companies like Bluehost or GoDaddy. But should “don’t use Bluehost” really be the go-to advice?

And, really, I get why some people might not want to recommend those firms. I too had serious problems with my past HostGator server (spam-related problems), and that is why I eventually decided to go elsewhere.

But perhaps I’m not the type of client that HostGator even wants to attract in the first place? I don’t need HostGator. My requirements are different. So why should I say that they’re “bad”? If you like your HostGator server, who am I to say that you’re wrong and should move to SiteGround or InMotion? Especially if the data confirms this, and it does – people really like their HostGator, Bluehost and GoDaddy servers.

Here’s one final comment by Ben Welch-Bolen, founder of Pressed.net. We asked Ben to share his thoughts on these survey results:

Ben Welch-Bolen on hosting

Ben Welch-Bolen
Founder of Pressed.net

I think we are all super internet nerds, and we are a bit blind to what the majority of businesses have a website for :). We all operate in or with businesses whose revenue is primarily internet driven, and we forget that most businesses just need a basic brochure website. Mass market shared hosting is just fine for 95% of the websites out there. Business owners are going to be happy as long as the site is up, and support is decent. Until their website is driving a large chunk of revenue they have no reason to invest past ten dollars a month in their web hosting.

 

2014 WordPress hosting survey results

 Audience: pro WordPress users. Number of respondents: ~160. 

💡 This is the original, market-provoking WordPress hosting survey did by the OG WPShout team.

Fred Meyer

Fred Meyer

We’re super-excited to present the results of the 2014 WPShout Hosting Review!

If you’re just joining us: the Hosting Review is an annual survey we conduct that gathers honest, unbiased thoughts from hundreds of real WordPress site owners about the hosting they’re using for their WordPress sites. We’ve collected this year’s results and analyzed them, and the results are below.

Last year’s hosting review gave a picture of a churning market with a lot of new entrants, and we’re really excited to update those results a year later.

P.S. This hosting review is now really really out of date. It offers an interesting snapshot of the hosting industry a couple of years ago, but should only be read as historical data.

 

Methodology

This year’s survey collects data in seven areas:

  1. Average satisfaction
  2. Value
  3. Reliability
  4. Speed
  5. Support
  6. Median site count
  7. Usability
  8. WordPress compatibility

In each area, we asked for an overall 1-10 impression, as well as text comments. We also collected information on each plan’s monthly cost, the number of sites being hosted on the plan, and monthly traffic to the hosted sites.

We put out this year’s survey in September, and promoted it on our social media channels and through WordPress friends (like WPTavern and WPShout founder Alex Denning) who were generous enough to share the survey. Results were collected during approximately a one-month period.

General satisfaction

The table below presents summary statistics on all 159 responses.

Cost Satisfaction Value Reliability Speed Support Usability WordPress Compatibility
Median:
15 9 9 9 8 9 8 10
Average:
58.20 8.0 8.1 8.5 7.9 8.1 8.1 8.8

Most survey respondents were quite satisfied with their hosting overall.

Most survey respondents were quite satisfied with their hosting overall. Average satisfaction across all measures hovered around 8, with 9 or 10 median scores for each.

The median overall cost for hosting was $15 per month.

Results by pricing tier

We analyzed overall survey results, broken down into four pricing tiers:

  1. $0 to $5 per month: Generally the cheapest shared hosting.
  2. $6 to $15 per month: Slightly more expensive shared hosting.
  3. $16 to $49 per month: Price range for much managed WordPress hosting.
  4. $50+ per month: Expensive managed and VPS hosting plans.

WPShout hosting survey graph: Customer experience by monthly cost

Customers in the cheapest pricing tier were the least satisfied overall, but customers in the third pricing tier felt that they were getting the least value for their money.

Overall, respondents most satisfied in the first and third pricing tiers. Customers in the cheapest shared hosting were the least satisfied overall, but customers in the third pricing tier perceived that they were getting the least value for their money.

As one would hope, site speed increased consistently through the four categories. However, usability, reliability, and support actually declined from the second to the third category. (Usability continued to decline in the fourth category, as well, as server administration is more often through command-line VPS configuration.)

Pattern: too big for their own good?

Name HostGator GoDaddy DreamHost Bluehost
Count 7 4 9 7
Median cost 15.0 17.0 11.0 5.0
Median traffic <10,000 <10,000 <10,000 <10,000
Satisfaction 5.7 6.5 6.7 6.9
Value 7.1 6.3 6.9 7.0
Reliability 7.9 7.8 6.8 6.1
Speed 5.3 6.0 6.0 5.7
Support 6.7 7.0 6.3 6.7
How many sites? 2 2 5 6
Usability 8.1 5.8 7.6 7.6
WordPress compatibility 8.2 8.5 8.2 7.9

Many of the lowest-rated hosts were also among the most commonly used.

Many of the lowest-rated hosts were also among the most commonly used. Hosting giants HostGator, GoDaddy, DreamHost, and Bluehost all significantly underperformed the other hosts reviewed.

Immense scale and a cram-everyone-through-the-door marketing strategy may not be kind for these hosts’ ability to deliver quality WordPress hosting. (Of the four, only DreamHost is not affiliated with hosting giants Endurance International or GoDaddy.) Large bureaucracies, profit-hungry shareholders, and the difficulty of training and coordinating huge tech support teams are also likely contributors to these hosts’ poor results.

One glimmer of hope to point out comes from an unlikely place: Two respondents seemed to like GoDaddy’s new managed WordPress offering fairly well.

Comments:

Bluehost: “Frequent down time recently.” “The most helpful support has come through social media (ie, ‘@BlueHost: We are experiencing some outages. Our engineers are investigating…’) while emails to support have gone unanswered.”

GoDaddy: “Surprisingly, GoDaddy has created a killer product with their Managed WordPress stuff.” “The worst file manager I’ve ever seen.” “Usability is pretty bad.”

HostGator: “Response very slow at times. Customer service has declined over time.” “Hosting is slow at times. WordPress sites are extremely slow at times, even with speed optimization. Support is not consistent.” “At the price this is ‘cheap’ hosting, and shows it.”

Dreamhost: See full profile below.

Pattern: host with the cool kids

Name A Small Orange Digital Ocean A2 Hosting Flywheel
Count 3 3 3 3
Median cost 7.0 10.0 8.0 15.0
Median traffic <10,000 10,000-20,000 <10,000 10,000-20,000
Satisfaction 9.0 9.0 9.7 10.0
Value 9.3 9.7 9.3 9.0
Reliability 9.7 9.7 9.7 9.7
Speed 9.0 9.3 9.0 9.0
Support 9.3 9.0 8.5 9.0
How many sites? 3 8 2 3
Usability 9.0 8.7 9.3 10.0
WordPress compatibility 9.7 8.3 10.0 10.0

There was a distinct middle tier of slightly less popular but very well-loved hosts.

Many of the hosts reviewed were relatively-to-very obscure, and received one or two results. At the other end of the spectrum, a few very large hosts (like the shared hosts above and WP Engine) dominate both the survey and the hosting space generally.

However, there was a distinct middle tier of slightly less popular but very well-loved hosts: much smaller than the biggest players, but of outstanding quality. Two of these hosts—A Small Orange (EIG-owned but still doing great) and Flywheel—took honors in last year’s survey, as well.

If you’re tired of your host feeling like an insurance company, it may be very worth your while to check out one of these off-the-beaten-path hosts.

Comments:

Digital Ocean: “Nearly 100% uptime. All downtime has been satisfactorily explained and, where possible, notice was given.” “I like the service a lot, and host many of my clients there.”

A2 Hosting: “Overall I’ve been very happy with A2 and I’d recommend them to other WordPress admins without reservation.” “I did not rate their support system as I have not had to use it. Everything else went as smooth as butter, so I’m thinking their support will be the same.” “Their support here is awesome. It feels like they are still a small company, but it was really the tech support phone calls that won me over.”

Flywheel: “Excellent customer service, and great speeds.” “If it breaks they are fix it. The Flywheel team is very responsive.”

A Small Orange: (No text comments.)

Pattern: the best premium hosting for the truly fancy sir or madame

Name Heart Internet Rackspace WP Engine Wiredtree Kinsta Lightning Base
Count 2 4 16 3 7 3
Median cost 69.5 135.0 102.0 55.0 97.0 50.0
Median traffic 10,000-20,000 20,000 100,000 20,000-50,000 10,000-20,000 <10,000
Satisfaction 8.0 8.0 8.5 8.7 9.3 9.7
Value 8.5 7.3 7.9 8.3 8.7 9.3
Reliability 9.0 9.3 9.6 9.7 9.4 9.7
Speed 8.5 7.3 8.7 7.7 10.0 10.0
Support 9.0 8.0 8.8 9.3 9.7 10.0
How many sites? 65 17 7 2 2 7
Usability 6.0 8.0 9.2 9.0 6.8 9.3
WordPress compatibility 5.5 9.0 9.6 9.3 9.9 9.7

Many of the survey’s very well-reviewed hosts aim at higher-tier customers.

Many of the survey’s very well-reviewed hosts aim at higher-tier customers—people spending $50 to hundreds or thousands per month for hosting. Some of these hosts (Lightning Base and WP Engine) are in managed WordPress hosting, and some simply provide dedicated hardware.

With these hosts, as the cost per month ramps up, the speed and quality of customer service really takes off. If you have money to spend and want the best experience possible, check these hosts out.

Comments:

Heart Internet: “Hosting is pretty fast and reliable and tech support is generally very good indeed, but communication with customers, especially in a crisis, is lacking.” “Very quick to get back to me, day or not. Helpful, knowledgeable and friendly staff.”

Rackspace: “It is not the fastest I have used and at that price I would like to see it a bit faster. But it is far more reliable in speed than most. When other shared servers are fast they are fast, but when they are slow they are unbearable, there is none of that.” “Easy to deploy sites, the control panel is the easiest I have used to date. They have removed all the clutter.” “Fantastic support.”

Wiredtree: “$55 for managed VPS is probably about as good as it gets.” “Good shadow backup.”

Kinsta: “Extremely fast hosting. The control panel and some of the functionality are not 100% finished just yet, though.” “They truly work hard to ensure that the site is up and running, that it’s running fast and that I can get help with any issues related to hosting.” “The support is very responsive which largely makes up for the poor admin area.” “Fastest I’ve experienced, especially in the admin areas of two heavily modified WP sites.” “Blazing.”

Lightning Base: “The sites are fantastically fast, and they provide stellar support. In fact, they provide the best customer support I’ve ever experienced.” “So fast and smart at support it’s almost annoying.” “Seamless, easy, and powerful!”

WP Engine: See full profile below.

Individual results

This section summarizes results for the most commonly reviewed hosts in the survey.

WP Engine

Responses 16
Median cost per month $102
Median traffic 100,000 visits per month
Satisfaction 8.5
Value 7.9
Reliability 9.6
Speed 8.7
Support 8.8
Median site count 7
Usability 9.2
WordPress compatibility 9.6

Selected comments

The good

Even though I’m paying $250/month which may seem expensive – to me, constantly worrying about servers (which is old school unless you run a hosting company or an IT dept) is expensive.
It’s good although I do exceed the number of visits under my plan so I am charged a bit more, which varies from month to month. But overall the value is there.
Expensive, but worth the money. Just missing the CDN (available for more money).
I have never once walked away from a support question with them that hasn’t been resolved. in fact, several times they have gone the extra mile for me.
Super fast – always amazed at how quick and authoritative the support is.

The bad

A tad expensive compared to other providers.
Would be nice if they added a larger number of visitors for each of the tiers, especially when the cost of cloud is consistently dropping.
Charging per visitor and counting spam bots as “visitors” is unforgivable.
A year ago, WP Engine’s support was second to none. Today, the first-tier support is nearly worthless; nearly every ticket I open has to be escalated to higher-tier support folks, and it can take days to get a resolution.
Basic support, excellent. Advanced support, slow and, at times, incompetent.
Their support is getting pretty bad.

SiteGround

Responses 9
Median cost 15
Median traffic <10,000 visits per month
Satisfaction 8.7
Value 8.7
Reliability 9.2
Speed 8.9
Support 8.7
Median site count 4
Usability 8.3
WordPress compatibility 8.8

Selected comments

The good

I think SiteGround is very good value, because you get many of the benefits of managed hosting for about half the cost, plus the benefits of traditional shared hosting on a cPanel account.
Stellar. Live chat, politeness, effeciency.
Tech support has been quick to respond to inquiries, even late at night. Have to go through support to update MX records for hosted domains.
Almost all my support experiences have been very positive… The SiteGround support staff has helped me find errors in my own code. They are generally both knowledgeable and patient. Support is by ticket only, but response time is amazingly quick.

The bad

Definitely worth the price bump. It renews at $30 though and that’s a lot of money.
Price is a little bit more than I’d like, but then again the GoGeek package provides a lot of features/benefits. Price seems to go up after first year, but in fact the first year is heavily discounted. No discount for renewal.

DreamHost

Responses 9
Median cost per month $11
Median traffic <10,000 visits per month
Satisfaction 6.7
Value 6.9
Reliability 6.8
Speed 6.0
Support 6.3
Median site count 5
Usability 7.6
WordPress compatibility 8.2

Selected comments

The good

100% uptime so far (4 months).
The best speeds I have experienced in 10 years with WordPress.
I love DreamHost and their attitude. I also love that they give free hosting to non-profits. That’s cool.

The bad

I’ve liked Dreamhost in the past, but it seems the speed becomes slower each year, the servers become less reliable, and the support less helpful.
Sites have been down, support was not available. No updates were posted on their site. I had to move almost all my accounts away from DreamHost about 3 years ago.
Tech support was very poor. Unable to contact anyone via the phone and the ticket system was not useful with response times in the days rather than hours, like other hosting companies used.
Their interface is not user friendly. The changes they have made in the past have only made it less so.
I’ve tried to optimize my sites in every way I can, but over time, the speed of sites on Dreamhost continues to drop. It has become unsustainable.

Media Temple

Responses 7
Median cost per month $22
Median traffic 10,000-20,000 visits per month
Satisfaction 7.1
Value 7.4
Reliability 8.0
Speed 8.0
Support 6.7
Median site count 7
Usability 8.0
WordPress compatibility 7.4

Selected comments

The good

Great response times for service requests.

The bad

The Media Temple tech support is terrible. I needed to install an SSL certificate and was given the run around by 6 different people. After buying two separate SSL certs, and speaking with 6 people over the course of a week and a half I was finally able to get it installed. No one knew where or what kind of cert I needed, so it was really a nightmare.
Vast majority of support staff don’t understand WordPress. They messed up domain transfer (they kept telling me I needed to contact GoDaddy for reasons they didn’t understand either; I only late found out GoDaddy owns them – worrying that their staff don’t seem to realise that) and staging sites (for days). No apology or explanation.

Concluding thoughts

If I could summarize the survey’s results into two axioms, they’d be:

1. Bet on slightly smaller, leaner, more agile hosts

Hosts with a “boutique” feel are often much better-positioned to deliver value.

Hosts with a “boutique” feel are often much better-positioned to deliver value in things like speed, technical precision, and customer service.

If you interact with too many big hosts, you’ll sometimes swear you can feel the drag on every part of the company as it starts to struggle under its own size—and the result is too often crowded servers, busy phone lines, and disoriented techs. This is even true of WordPress hosting’s biggest success story, WP Engine, which is still a great host but is suffering pronounced growing pains this year.

Of course, you don’t want to host on the spare iMac in someone’s basement—the trick is the right balance between lean-and-mean and built-by-experts.

2. Stretch your budget just a bit

Be willing to spend a bit more to get out of the pricing doldrums.

The graph at the top shows two price-tier doldrums: the cheapest hosting ($5 or less per month), and the second most expensive ($16-49).

If you care about your site, be willing to spend a bit more to get out of these valleys. If you’re on $2 hosting and you’re tearing your hair out because your site’s down all the time, try throwing another $4 a month (that’s about two-thirds of a sandwich) at the problem—perhaps with a host with a better quality reputation—and see if it improves.

Likewise, if your successful site is on $29 managed WordPress hosting and you’re getting hit with slowdowns, 502 errors, and overage fees, see what a small additional investment in boutique managed WordPress—or even a VPS—will get you. It may be an investment that pays for itself right away in hours not wasted and headaches not suffered.

Other notes

Survey responses

Our goal this year was 500 respondents. We fell far short of that goal, taking in 159, slightly fewer than last year. We recognize that surveys can be hard to enjoy taking (in fact, I can often barely bring myself to fill out Doodle polls), so we’ve got some ideas that we hope will really help create a surge in participation next year. Stay tuned for that, and in the meantime, thank you so much to everyone who contributed!

Final methodological note

One hosting company, Havenswift, sent a survey link to its customers. As a result, Havenswift received 13 responses despite being quite a bit smaller than other respondents with similar numbers of responses like WP Engine and Dreamhost. These responses should be valid for Havenswift itself, as the link was sent to all customers, not just to “happy” ones. However, we have removed Havenswift responses from our summary statistics—the section at the top capturing how satisfied people are with their hosting overall—so as not to skew them. Here are the Havenswift results:

Responses 13
Median cost per month $27
Median traffic 10,000-20,000 visits per month
Average satisfaction 9.3
Value 9.0
Reliability 9.6
Speed 9.3
Support 9.8
Median site count 1
Usability 9.5
WordPress compatibility 9.5

And finally…

Thanks so much for reading! If we’ve helped you, please share on social media, and join our mailing list for more WordPress thoughtfulness. And if you have any thoughts or questions about the survey, we’d love to hear them in the comments below!

Over to you!

What do you think? Does it make sense at all? Also, are you surprised by the survey results?

Here are all the data packs once again if you want to check them out and analyze yourself: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022.

Don’t forget to join our crash course on speeding up your WordPress site. Learn more below:

Yay! 🎉 You made it to the end of the article!
Karol K
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Patty Ayers
August 11, 2017 8:39 pm

Despite the constant negative press, covfefe. Whoops, I mean, despite the constant negative press, GoDaddy as a web host has been getting great reviews from users for years now. This reminds me of how many years it took for “insiders” to stop kvetching about PayPal and face up to it being a good, reliable service.

Scott Sutton
July 24, 2017 9:58 pm

So either EIG paid for these results or now owns CodeinWP. Those are the only plausible explanations for such ridiculous results.

Nikhil Makwana
July 20, 2017 3:22 pm

I’m using Hostgator, and I love it. I can rely on their customer care service team for fast and friendly responses. It’s a reliable and easy to use the platform. I recommend this to all my fellow.

Karol K.
July 20, 2017 5:36 pm
Reply to  Nikhil Makwana

What hosting tier are you on?

Mark Gason
July 20, 2017 2:18 am

I sometimes recommend Hostgator to clients who want to handle their own shared cheap hosting. It is where I started out. Now I use WPEngine and Cloudways for my clients. I find the interesting thing about this is that how likely would you be to recommend your host, or how happy are you, return numbers in the range of 7 or 8 and we think that is good? A successful service business in another industry would be shooting for numbers in 9.9 range.

Ionut Neagu
July 20, 2017 1:28 pm
Reply to  Mark Gason

Hey Mark,
Karol wanted rather to emphasise more on the fact that 7-8 is more than professionals think, I shared for example this on Facebook in a WP hosting group and people there would rate HostGator for example 3-4, is also what we saw in the 2016 survey.

realbasics
July 19, 2017 10:37 pm

Sounds a bit like the well-understood “all congressmen are crooks except mine, mine’s great” phenomenon. Gonna say the vast majority of users have experience with only one hosting company, that the vast majority’s experience with their host isn’t very bad, so it’s not surprising that they’re going to recommend their host. I’d add that in my experience GoDaddy, especially, but also HostGator and BlueHost have some of the most friendly, informed, and helpful support people in the business. Which is good because of my 70 or so maintenance clients GoDaddy and HostGator are the only support numbers I call so often I have them on speed dial. (Aside: GoDaddy’s “…helping others make a statement on the web” robovoice is adorably cute. HostGator desperately needs to update its catchy but 8-bit-quality on-hold music.) To be honest I’d love to be able to go back to recommending GoDaddy. They really do contribute a lot to the WP community. They really do have some of the best tech support. Their signup process really is easy. It’s just there are weird quirky things about their actual service that the vast, vast majority of users don’t really care much about. And have no reason to.… Read more »

VC Nickels
July 19, 2017 10:27 pm

HostGator is AWFUL. I do not believe for one minute that those results are legit. Not to say there’s shenanigans on your end but on theirs.
I’ve had to file a BBB complaint against them, threaten more, take my complaints to Twitter and Facebook because their support is terrible at responding and when they do they never solve anything. They are wretched.
If you use HostGator, stop. If you’re thinking of using them, don’t.

Karol K.
July 20, 2017 5:36 pm
Reply to  VC Nickels

Okay, so I had some HostGator troubles myself in the past. I’m not a huge fan by any means. Just wanted to set this straight.
But still, I can’t advise people to stop using HG if they’re on it and they’re enjoying it. Plus, even some bigger sites in the community seem to be quite happy with their HG hosting, like WPBeginner, for example.

VC Nickels
July 20, 2017 8:52 pm
Reply to  Karol K.

That may be but they are *still* awful. I’m sure the big sites like WPBeginner get treated like royalty for the traffic they drive to them. Regardless, I can tell you that if you need support from them or have a problem with their billing they will leave you hanging. They have been sliding down hill rapidly since they were taken over by EIG.
Every company EIG has gobbled up (which is quite a lot) has serious issues with performance and, even more so, customer service. HostGator and the rest of the EIG companies should not be supported and sending small businesses to them because of an affiliate deal is an incredible disservice .

Mike
July 21, 2017 4:18 am
Reply to  VC Nickels

I had issues with HostGator several years ago, but they’ve been fine for a long time now. I host a bunch of client sites there and have had very few downtime or speed issues in the past 3 or 4 years.

Patty Ayers
August 11, 2017 8:42 pm
Reply to  Karol K.

I’m not a “casual user”, and have been using HostGator for about 7 years now, for dozens of websites. Overall, they’ve been great; almost zero significant problems. I almost wish I had reason to switch to a cooler hosting provider, but everything has been so smooth there’s no motivation to change.

Jaime Paulo Lopes
July 19, 2017 3:50 pm

I don’t know how Afrihost got on here for South Africa coz i’ve found Cybersmart or Hetzner WAY, way quicker for wordpress sites, don’t get me wrong they are a good ISP, but i’m not impressed with their hosting!

Robert Dallison
July 18, 2017 7:25 pm

Useful insight, thanks for publishing your findings. I’d like to know which are the hosting providers that BOTH have a good approval rating (or NPS score) AND support Let’s Encrypt. I’m looking to move a number of sites to SSL (including the associated dev/uat sites) and I need a solid hosting provider that won’t make me pay for SSL certificates that I can get for free from LE. Unfortunately none of the big hosting providers seem to allow you to install certs that they haven’t sold you. I know that SiteGround supports what I’m looking for – to a degree – but I wonder if the community here can point me to any others. I don’t like having a “choice” of only one…

Ionut Neagu
July 18, 2017 10:22 pm

Hey Robert,
I remember InMotion emailed me about that, that they offer SSL for free, it worth asking them more.

Dumitru Brinzan
July 18, 2017 2:01 pm

I think that an in-depth article like this one should address at least in passing the EIG+SiteLock issue.

Ionut Neagu
July 18, 2017 2:33 pm

I think our audience is pretty familiar with all those bad things, we even wrote about them before. The point we are trying to make is that there are other people out there, using/buying hosting, that are not web professionals, nor care much.
Karol will take a look and see if the mention makes sense.

Dumitru Brinzan
July 18, 2017 2:37 pm
Reply to  Ionut Neagu

Fair enough.

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