WordPress Hosting Survey Archives 2016-2020: Huge Hosting Surveys Summarized in One Place

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

2019 WordPress hosting survey results

🔥 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:

• GoDaddy – used by 16.19% users
• Bluehost – 13.25%
• HostGator – 9%
• SiteGround – 6.74%
• Namecheap – 3.34%

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:

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

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.

🌎 Popular hosts by country

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:

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.

👍 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:

🌱 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:

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

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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”:

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

2018 WordPress hosting survey results

First, we want to thank everybody who took a couple of minutes out of their busy daily schedules to complete the survey and review their current hosting providers. We got 830 valid responses in total, which makes this one of the biggest WordPress hosting surveys to date! It’s because of you that this was possible! 👍🍾

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

Some more detail:

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:

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:

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

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:

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

Now see what happens when we add GoDaddy:

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.

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:

😃 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:

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:

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:

🤼 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:

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 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:

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

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

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.

* 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.

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:

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:

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:

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.

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:

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.

* 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

⏮️ “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.

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.

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:

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.

🎓 Conclusions?

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!) Download here.

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

2017 WordPress hosting survey results

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?”

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:

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:

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:

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

Here’s a more detailed look per hosting company:

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.

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.

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.

Popular hosts by country

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:

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.

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:

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! Download here.

2016 WordPress hosting survey results

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:

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:

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.

And when we add GoDaddy to the mix:

(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.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

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

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:

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

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:

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:

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:

Most reliable WordPress hosts and most user-friendly ones

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:

More?

Lastly, here’s the raw-data export file if you want to analyze the results on your own. Don’t forget to let us know if you find anything interesting!

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.