A month ago, we invited our community to participate in a hosting survey. This WordPress website hosting survey is intended as a public service to the Event Espresso and WordPress communities. Our only interest is to provide these communities more information so they can choose the best WordPress host given their needs.
We are pleased to share the (not-statistically-valid) results of our 2015 WordPress Website Hosting Survey. Hopefully next year you will help spread the word about the WordPress website hosting survey to get more results so the data is more representative. We only included results for hosts with three or more complete responses, but you are free to look at the results yourself.
Note: This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the hosting links and signup, we may receive monetary compensation.
Article Outline
WordPress Hosting in General
- Collectively, Uptime (4.38/5) received the highest average scores, while Support (4.03/5) received the lowest average scores.
- On average, respondents are spending about $50//mo on hosting.
Hosting Support
- SiteGround: 5.0
- WP Engine: 4.75
- Inmotion: 4.6
- DreamHost: 4.3
- Bluehost: 4.0
- HostGator: 3.8
- GoDaddy: 3.1
Hosting Uptime
Hosting Features
- SiteGround: 4.75
- WP Engine: 4.71
- Inmotion: 4.67
- DreamHost: 4.3
- Bluehost: 4.2
- Hostgator: 3.6
- GoDaddy: 3.0
Hosting Value
- SiteGround: 4.75
- Inmotion: 4.67
- Bluehost: 4.6
- WP Engine: 4.5
- DreamHost: 4.0
- Hostgator: 3.8
- GoDaddy: 3.43
Average Scores for Website Hosting
- SiteGround: 4.88
- WP Engine: 4.74
- Inmotion: 4.67
- Bluehost: 4.35
- DreamHost: 4.34
- Hostgator: 3.75
- GoDaddy: 3.43
Closing Comments:
We’d like to take the liberty to share a couple points of interests about these hosts.
Managed WordPress hosting and caching
- The survey responses did not indicate whether or not their Event Espresso 4 powered site is hosted on GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress platform. We can conclude that anyone using EE4 is hosted on the regular GoDaddy hosting package, because Event Espresso 4 does not work as expected on GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress hosting due to their inability to disable caching for specific pages.
- WP Engine received high marks for support, which was not a surprise to support staff. This is because we’ve found that WP Engine support staff are very responsive whenever a few initial issues arise due to caching. They’ve been very helpful to Event Espresso customers to who request help with configuring specific pages to be excluded from caching.
Good information to know before I implement EE4 on our GoDaddy WordPRess hosted sites. I know now I’ll have to move those sites prior…sigh… Thanks for sharing this information!!!
A Small Orange Hosting – all the way!
Thanks for completing the survey.
I don’t think you have really completed an apples to apples comparison which would have been very informative and helpful.
I don’t think it is a fair comparison to compare dedicated servers with full WP hosted support, dedicated servers with self support, with shared servers. As a result you average $50 per month for hosting is ridiculously high for most businesses contemplating an Event management site.
Paying $300 per month to host a wp website compared with $12 per month with shared hosting is not comparable. I suspect if you breakout the categories, your average shared hosting will come out < $20 / month. (We currently pay < $14 / month with Hostgator)
There are different categories, would be helpful if you would average out the performance for each category.
For example, it would be helpful to know what does going to a dedicated server do for up-time, what percentage of availability outages are as a result of app bugs rather than hosting downtime?
What is the average response time (page load), and how large is their target Event registration audience.
its a lot of work, and as you found out difficult to obtain good data without a lot of scrubbing through personal interviews.
Thanks
I don’t think we intended this survey to be a full apples-to-apples comparison. We offered this as a basic service to our community as just a starting point to understand the performance and ratings of hosts. We plan to do more granular reporting in future surveys if can get more participation. But this is also why we gave you access to the data so you can look at the categories that mean the most to you. We knew we didn’t have all that data people would want, nor have it broken up into finite categories for comparison, but we lean towards releasing these results so people can peruse the data rather than hide it away so that nobody can see it.
Here’s to the next iteration which will be bigger and better next year.
As a point of comparison on dedicated servers, I compared like server plans on SiteGround, GoDaddy, InMotion, and BlueHost. The old adage is true, I guess, that you get what you pay for. In determining value/cost ratio, I gave a point value to all known features like comparable RAM, CPU speed, HD, and Bandwidth offered. As a result, the results that BlueHost is the best value at a ratio of .13, followed by InMotion at .12, and then (believe it or not…) GoDaddy at .11. Last place was SiteGround. The trade-offs are always significant when it comes to size of HD, bandwidth and price. SiteGround is the most expensive with the lowest bandwidth allocation, resulting in a low ratio.