2024 WordPress Hosting Survey: According to 1,800+ Respondents, Hostinger Wins the Popularity Contest

That’s the kind of stuff you can learn only from actual users and website owners. And this is where our WordPress hosting survey comes into play! ⚽

🔥 Hostinger takes over as most popular, decrowns GoDaddy

For years now, if there was one thing you could be certain of, it was that GoDaddy would always come on top as the most popular host.

Not this year, though. There’s been a change in the leadership position.

By a quite narrow margin – but still(!) – Hostinger takes the spot as the most popular host, as reported by our survey respondents.

The raw numbers are this:

Here’s how the popularity contest played out over the last couple of years (according to our previous surveys):

It’s very interesting how, year after year, Hostinger was chipping away at the other hosts’ market share, getting more and more customers. Actually, these survey findings seem to mimic larger trends, as Hostinger has had an absolutely massive pop in Google Trends over the years.

Looking at data from the past five years, Hostinger was basically at the bottom of Google Trends in 2019 and prior, but then somewhere in late 2021 it started growing significantly:

Have you noticed one brand missing from the chart? Look what happens when I add GoDaddy to the mix:

So yeah, we do still have to give it to GoDaddy for being probably the strongest brand in web hosting overall. 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.

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.

There were also some interesting changes further down in the lineup. Quite similarly to Hostinger’s rise in the stands, we can’t ignore HostGator’s fall. Ever since the 2017 edition of the survey, the Gator has been on the decline in popularity ranks. SiteGround’s seeding is also interesting. For the most part, the company has been steadily at no. 4, with one slight dip in 2022. Our sample is, of course, still small, but this dip corresponds nicely with their temporary price hike between 2020-2022.

One last thing; a group of hosts that you might notice aren’t on the list are the more “premium” managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine, Kinsta, Pagely, Rocket, Cloudways, and so on. (Learn about the difference between shared and managed WordPress hosting here.)

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, this year WP Engine received 9 entries and Kinsta received just 6, while Cloudways ends up being the leader of this pack with still only 13 entries.

🏆 Who’s the top-rated WordPress hosting company of 2024?

With the popularity contest out of the way, here are the top-rated WordPress hosting companies according to our 1,800+ survey respondents. First, I’m going to show you the leaders divided in brackets based on the number of votes they got, and then the the entire data set below that.

Top rated hosts that got 100 votes or more (ordered by rating):

Top rated hosts that got between 35-100 votes (ordered by rating):

Top rated hosts that got 35 votes or less (ordered by rating):

I’ve decided to show you the above results in popularity brackets because I don’t think it would be fair to say that some of the hosts that got only 10 or so votes should be perceived as the winners of the survey. For example, Amazon scored 9.08, which is the top rating, but I’m not sure if we should take the opinion of 18 users on par with 153 people that told us about Hostinger. But, either way, that’s the data, and please draw your own conclusions. 🙌

Here’s the full data table with all the hosts that got around 10 votes or more:

Reminder; You can get the full data file at the bottom of this post.

Let’s look at those NPS scores for a minute. Among the companies that received a significant enough number of responses, Namecheap has the highest NPS at 41. It also has a strong proportion of promoters (58.82%) and a relatively low rate of detractors (17.65%).

SiteGround and Hostinger follow closely, with NPS of 36 and 33, respectively, showing that a large portion of their users are promoters. At the lower end, HostGator and GoDaddy have negative NPS scores of -14 and -17, indicating more detractors than promoters, which could suggest lower satisfaction among their users.

One more interesting bit of information here is that GoDaddy is indeed the lowest-rated popular host on our list. Actually, it had the lowest rating of any host with more than 15 responses. Moreover, its rating is below the overall survey average of 7.18 – the average rating for all submissions in this WordPress hosting survey.

🌎 Popular hosts and ratings vary by country

The landscape of WordPress hosting preferences shows some interesting shifts in this year’s survey, as you’ve seen already. While the global picture tells the story of Hostinger becoming the new leader, GoDaddy still remains the most popular company in the US, and by a wide margin, according to our survey data.

We can probably attribute this to multiple factors, and their rather aggressive marketing and widespread brand recognition surely play an important role in this.

So what’s going on with Hostinger? They have to be the leader somewhere, right?

As it turns out, not necessarily.

They hold the leadership position in just one of the most represented countries in our survey. However, when we aggregate the global data, Hostinger’s strong performance across various non-US markets positions them as the overall leader.

Let’s zoom out and look at the international markets more broadly:

As in our previous surveys, we collected responses from users all around the world. Here’s the distribution of answers we got per country:

Some observations:

• The top eight countries were exactly the same as in our previous survey. The only change is that Nigeria and Australia have switched places.
• The share that US respondents have in the survey fluctuates the most from survey to survey. In 2020, it was 22.4%. In 2022, it was 35.8% – the highest share recorded.

The list above is by no means the full list. In total, we had responses from 120 different countries 🌎 on every continent except Antarctica. 🧊

As you’d expect, hosting preferences differ by country, but maybe not as much as you think. For example, GoDaddy is still the most popular host in most countries. But there are some outliers, such as IONOS, being the top host in the UK, plus various other more local hosts that have strong enough brands to lead the market in their respective countries.

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

Hostinger truly is an interesting case here. Usually, in our surveys, the global popularity was driven mostly by the numbers from the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. All of those countries contributed to GoDaddy’s total numbers enough to make them the most popular host globally.

This year, however, it’s Hostinger’s growth in the non-US markets that ended up being more than enough to make it the leader globally.

Anecdotally, we’ve noticed that Hostinger does a lot of marketing outside the US and focuses a lot on providing local language versions and prices in multiple countries around the globe.

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

In other words, let’s see how happy people generally are with their hosts based on the country they’re from:

Based on this, users in India are the happiest with their hosts, while users in Australia are the least. 😖

This is actually very reminiscent of our previous survey – at least when it comes to global trends. As you can see in the table above, the sentiment was quite similar.

It’s also worth noting that users in the US and the UK have grown to appreciate their hosts a bit more than last time. 🥹

We can also look at user satisfaction through the lens of NPS and break those scores down by country. Here are some interesting conclusions from that:

• South Africa shows the highest NPS score of 46, suggesting a strong level of satisfaction among its respondents, but we should take this with a grain of salt given that we’ve gotten only 41 responses from there in total.
• India also shows a positive score of 29, based on 142 total responses.
• The US has a moderate NPS score of 11, with a balanced ratio of promoters and detractors.
• On the lower end, Australia and Nigeria, as you’ve seen above in the ratings tables, have negative scores of -22 and -19 respectively, indicating prevalent dissatisfaction among the respondents from these countries.

Which brings me to:

👍 People are generally happy with their hosting

The overall rating this year across all hosts and all responses was 7.18 out of 10.

This means that most people are still generally happy with their hosting provider. And that makes sense – if someone was unhappy, you’d think they would switch to a different host rather than soldiering through.

With that being said, this year’s average rating is the lowest that it’s been in any of our surveys. It was: 7.20 in 2022, 7.61 in 2020, 7.40 in 2019, and 7.70 in 2017.

If you want to investigate it a bit more, here’s the distribution of the votes we got across all the responses:

While we can see some fluctuation from year to year, the overall distribution of answers remains similar. And, most notable, the perfect 10 remains the most popular response – more than 30% of all respondents rated their web host 10/10.

☯️ Is “WordPress” a host? Year after year, the ambiguity continues

As has been a difficulty in previous surveys, we had lots 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 people actually mean when they say this.

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.

Additionally, to make this even more difficult, we’ve actually had some answers for WordPress.com (12 of them).

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).

In the end, I’m not drawing any conclusions based on the “WordPress” answers, but if you want to take a look yourself, again, the full data set is available at the bottom of the post.

Oh, and just to let you know, “WordPress” wasn’t even close to the wildest responses we got. For those who might be keeping track, “my mom” hosts websites for five respondents, and one of them even wants to switch to my mom’s hosting. So I guess we’re expanding the business next year. 👸🏻

🏎️ Is speed essential for users?

Quick note: If you’re interested in speed, particularly, I’ve done a deep dive into the fastest WordPress hosting in a recent research piece here on the blog. I’ve taken data from 14,000 individual measurements that we did over three years for 15 different hosts to find out who the fastest one is. Check it out.

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, I’ve decided to go a step further here and actually use all the speed data of our own from the research piece mentioned above.

The following table reveals not whether people say that speed is important to them, but instead focuses on the correlation between the rating and the real speed test data. Also, to make it a bit more representative, I’ve looked at the load time averages matched with the specific region it was measured from.

For example, if a survey response came from a user from the US, I took the average load times as measured from the US. If the user was from Germany, I took the average measurement from Europe. Then, for India and Australia, I took the results as measured from Asia.

With all that out of the way, here are the top-rated hosts vs their performance data per region from which the vote was given:

There doesn’t seem to be any significant correlation between load times and the general satisfaction reported by the users. The ratings and load times are all over the place – we have fast hosts with low ratings, fast hosts with high ratings, slow hosts with high ratings, and slow hosts with low ratings. It’s one big soup.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that our experiments have been done on specific setups, running specific website configurations. The loading times we got are not necessarily what other users experienced as well.

Anyway, so this data tells us that people don’t really factor in site speed when rating their hosting setups, so what do they factor in? Or, at least, what do they say that they factor in?

Let’s check this out next:

⭐ What people value about their WordPress hosts

This has been an optional question in all the editions of the survey. This year, it received 340 responses.

You can probably guess what the no. 1 most valued factor would be when rating someone’s experience with a web host, and you wouldn’t be mistaken. Here’s the data:

So yes, customer support quality takes the first spot! And the result of the survey was exactly the same last time, too.

Another thing we can look at here are the leading hosting companies for each of the most popular, top-valued factors. In other words, which hosting company got the most votes for their customer support, ease of use, and price. Unfortunately, there’s not enough data on the other factors for it to make sense to break them down per host.

Granted, the numbers are super small, 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 asked which hosting provider they would go for.

Here’s what they said:

As you can see there, compared to our last survey, Bluehost was the leader among the hosts people wanted to switch to back in 2022. However, this year, this category is yet another that has been claimed by Hostinger.

That said, most users in our survey are either not planning on switching at all or don’t have any particular host in mind yet.

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

🖥️ How many sites do users host?

Most people only host one website…which is not exactly surprising.

This trend was pretty much identical in our 2022 WordPress hosting survey and even the 2020 survey before that, so not much has changed in people’s habits over all those years.

Here’s how the data breaks down:

I consider it an interesting trend that in both of the recent surveys, more people host three to five websites than two. I guess that if you’re going to break above the one-site mark, you might as well go bigger right away.

Now, 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. This is the exact same thing we saw last time as well.

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

You’d expect that the more sites someone hosts, the more they’re going to pay.

Well, yes, okay, this should be true, but actually, there are countless hosting companies that will offer “unlimited” plans that are very affordable. So overall cost doesn’t have to pair with the number of sites hosted after all.

But is it like that? Let’s see:

I’ve chosen to show the median cost vs the average cost because the latter turned out to be surprisingly high.

For example, the average cost of hosting one website is $17.36 per month, according to our respondents. It looks like some people are really overpaying for hosting, and it raises the average value a lot compared to the median.

One more interesting observation that cannot be avoided is that those median prices have risen significantly since our last survey. Of course, the actual price tags for most of the hosts have remained the same, but in practice, people still somehow end up paying more than before.

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

💰 How much people pay for WordPress hosting

The median WordPress hosting bill is $10.95 per month.

This median price has been growing steadily year over year:

• It was $6 per month according to our 2020 survey, and $9 per month in 2022.

What could be the reason of these changes?

For starters, the survey doesn’t hit the exact same demographic every year. But more likely, many hosting companies have low-key raised their prices over the years. Of course, they don’t do it when it comes to the entry-level intro prices, but rather increase the prices of renewals.

For example, check out the pricing pages of SiteGround and Bluehost, but pay attention to the strike-through prices. Those are how much renewals cost after your first contract is up:

With SiteGround, for example, the price rises six times. For all it’s worth, the “$3 a month host” is a marketing myth.

Managed WordPress hosts like Kinsta are more predictable when it comes to long-term pricing – they don’t do those price hikes at all, but the tradeoff is that you just pay way more from day one.

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

Some takeaways:

• The most popular bracket? It’s “less than $1” 11.80% of people who gave us an answer pay $0-$1 for WordPress hosting.
• The most popular paid bracket? $4 – $5.99 per month at 11.59% which is only a tiny bit less than the sub-$1 bracket.
• 33.91% of people in total pay for their hosting $6 per month or less.

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:

Takeaways:

• Of the hosts that got at least 10 mentions, Namecheap is the cheapest on our list – median cost at $7 per month.
• Hostinger, even though it has one of the lowest entry prices, still ends up costing their users around $7.25 per month.
• Most budget hosts like GoDaddy, Bluehost, IONOS, and HostGator end up costing people much more than what’s advertised.

🤔 Final thoughts and comments

As I mentioned in the intro, one of the main reasons we’re doing these WordPress hosting surveys is to learn which hosting companies real users actually enjoy over the long term. We can then take this insight into account when recommending hosting setups across our many resources on the blog.

Talking about hosting has always been a difficult thing to do. In the WordPress space, mainstream hosts, like Bluehost or Namecheap, are not always appreciated and don’t have the best reputation among the pros (people building sites for a living).

If you’re active in one of the popular WordPress hosting Facebook groups, you’ll pretty much never see GoDaddy or Bluehost recommended as top options. But despite not being touted among advanced WordPress users, these types of hosts still absolutely dominate the marketplace.

Most WordPress pros and developers will rather recommend WP Engine or Kinsta instead – being popular managed hosting solutions.

However, we find it difficult to always point readers to hosting that’s around $30 a month and tell them that it’s the only reasonable option while there are hosts out there that end up costing half or one third the price – particularly when hosting a new blog with low traffic.

Judging by the answers we received, users aren’t generally getting a worse experience from the cheaper hosts. While more expensive companies have good ratings as well, there’s no longer a gap between the cheap and the premium.

Plus, as you’ve seen above, even though lots of companies offer really cheap entry-level plans for $3 a month or so, the actual amount that people pay long term ends up being a lot higher – $10.95.

Of course, we do realize that everyone has different needs, and the more pro-like your server is, the more you’ll probably benefit from a tailor-made managed setup with a premium company.

For new websites and small business owners, though, cheap hosting will be more than enough. There really isn’t a reason to pay more than $5 per month to host a new site that’s just starting out in 2024. However, also be aware that if you plan on staying with your host long term, you will pay double that when it averages out over time.

💬 But what do you think? Are you likely to recommend Hostinger or Bluehost to someone looking for a WordPress host? Let us know in the comments.

🧮 Our survey methodology

Here’s the bigger story of how these surveys started and why we’re doing them:

WordPress hosting is a crucial subject, and not just for us, but for anyone using WordPress to manage an authentic website, business, or publication. A quality hosting platform ensures that your content or services are accessible online. Naturally, we all want to learn who’s the best WordPress host out there and hopefully allow the bad ones to get out of the way.

Most WordPress publications in this ecosystem tackle the hosting topic frequently. You will find countless reviews covering all hosts imaginable, even the super-small ones. We take part in this never-ending search as well. We’ve done posts that look at all the companies from a bird’s-eye view; we did detailed experiments lasting 3+ years to find the fastest hosts, plus all sorts of individual reviews and head-to-head comparisons, looking at various niches and angles.

That being said, the thing is that we can’t really know who is actually the top hosting company if we only have our own handful of test sites to examine. Even though we do a lot of testing ourselves, the data sample is still relatively small, and it’s nothing compared to our readers’ collective opinions. This real-world insight is something we can only get from other users.

Over the course of our various WordPress hosting surveys, we’ve taken different approaches to collecting that data.

In some of our earlier surveys, we focused on gathering data from a smaller number of “pro” WordPress users. However, the issue we faced was that while the results were very interesting (see them here), the sample size was rather small, so we didn’t feel that the conclusions could be that rock solid. To battle that, for most of our recent surveys (this one included), we’ve decided to broaden the survey and show it to a much wider audience – whether they’re “pro” or total newbies getting their feet wet with WordPress for the first time.

Ever since we’ve made that switch, the way we conduct the WordPress hosting survey every year is pretty similar. It runs very quietly in the background (as a pop-up), with no advertisements and without social media shares or invites to take part – basically, without any active promotion at all. We wanted to keep things under the radar just to avoid any potential interruptions or (too many) spam entries.

Here are the questions that were asked this year:

We also adjusted the sequence of these questions a bit based on the initial response to question no. 2.

• If the user rated their host 0-8, we sent them over to question no. 3: “Which hosting are you planning to switch to?”
• If the user rated their host 9-10, we sent them over to question no. 4: “What do you value the most about your hosting?”

In the previous surveys, we found that asking the “value” question in cases where someone rated their host low was counterproductive and only resulted in a lot of angry responses, many of which were not fit for publication. 😃

👉 Get the data file for this WordPress hosting survey

Here’s the raw data file in case you want to analyze the results on your own. Don’t forget to let us know if you find anything interesting!

Looking for data files from our previous WordPress hosting surveys? We offer them in our archive post here.