Back in April, we invited our community to participate in a WordPress website hosting survey. This WordPress 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 hosting given their needs.
We are pleased to share the (not-statistically-valid) results of our 2016 hosting survey. Of the 115 total results, we only included results for hosts with four or more complete responses, but you are free to look at the full results yourself.
Definition: Web hosting is the activity or service of providing storage space to individuals or organizations, for the websites that are accessible via World Wide Web. Learn more about web hosting
Note: This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the hosting links and signup for their hosting services, we may receive monetary compensation.
Article Outline
WordPress Hosting Survey Results
Hosting Support
- SiteGround: 5.0
- WP Engine: 4.8
- Digital Ocean: 4.6
- DreamHost: 4.2
- HostGator, Godaddy, & Site5: 3.5
- Bluehost: 3.4
Hosting Uptime
- SiteGround & WP Engine: 5.0
- DreamHost: 4.7
- GoDaddy: 4.6
- Digital Ocean: 4.4
- Hostgator: 4
- Bluehost: 3.75
- Site5: 3.2
Hosting Features
- Digital Ocean, SiteGround & WP Engine: 4.8
- Bluehost, DreamHost, GoDaddy & Site5: 4.2
- Hostgator: 3.6
Hosting Value
- SiteGround: 5
- WP Engine: 4.5
- Digital Ocean: 4.4
- DreamHost: 4.2
- Hostgator & GoDaddy: 3.8
- Bluehost: 3.4
- Site5: 3.2
Average Scores for Website Hosting
- SiteGround: 4.91
- WP Engine: 4.77
- Digital Ocean: 4.5
- GoDaddy: 4.22
- DreamHost: 4.36
- Hostgator: 4.0
- Bluehost: 3.68
- Site5: 3.62
Closing Comments:
We’d like to take the liberty to share a a few points of interest about these hosts:
- Again this year, SiteGround and WP Engine are leading the pack for best WordPress hosting all around. While GoDaddy seems to have improved significantly since 2015.
- Unfortunately InMotion Hosting, Liquid Web, and a few others were excluded from the lists above, because we didn’t receive enough responses. Full results can be viewed here.
WordPress Hosting in General
- Collectively, Uptime (4.64/5) and Features (4.49/5) received the highest average scores, while Support (4.24/5) and Overall Value (4.32/5) received the lowest average scores.
- On average, respondents are spending about $55/mo on hosting. That seems to be up $5 from last year’s survey results.
Our Perspective
Over the past 7 years, we’ve struggled with our own hosting issues. We’ve also seen our customers struggle with low cost/cheap hosting the most; while customers that have spent a little more on WordPress hosting from the start have had much better success with ticket sales and up-time.
With the right hosting environment your ticket sales can really soar. For example, our hosted ticketing service, Event Smart, is able to process over 1,000 registrations per hour on Amazon Web Services hosting. Of course there’s no way we could do that with a shared hosting provider, or even some dedicated servers.
Notable Respondent Comments
Unedited responses from our 2016 WordPress Hosting Survey:
- When it comes to hosting YOU really do get what you pay for. We use and highly recommend WP Engine. Why, because they listen to their customers.They are NOT the cheapest hosting provider and that’s OK cause were not interested in cheap We are interested in keeping our website up and an ensuring that the Security Side always taken care of by professionals. The range of tools they offer for User and Developers alike is cutting edge. No CPanel..what they have built is more intuitive and easier to understand and use. Above all their Customer support is experienced with WordPress and have the technical background to support their clients. IN the end run this means more money in my pocket as I don’t have to chase down security issues and if I have a question, I get someone with the knowledge to answer it.
- I actually use all three of your top contenders: InMotion VPS, SiteGround, and WPEngine. InMotion was great several years ago, but service and overall value have dropped since they grew so fast. Their higher priced VPS accounts you would think would come with more support, but just the opposite is true. SiteGround is very attentive. They answer the phone and chat straight away, but we have experienced more than one serious screw-up due to the language differences and their haste to get tickets completed. WPE has its own set of issues, of course. No cpanel there. You have to play by their rules, but when you do everything just flows smoothly. It is also comforting to know whoever you contact there probably knows more about WordPress than you!
- I have tried a some of the hosts in the list and they are AWFUL: Arvixe, HostGator, Small Orange. Arvixe and Small Orange used to be good when they were small, but once they got to be a certain size, the customer support, speed, and reliability all went downhill. I have found this to be the case with nearly ALL webhosts, and have found that the only thing that can really be done when you are in the $50-100/month hosting range is to move around every few years to a host that is big enough to be fast, and small enough to still provide great technical support.
Excellent survey guys. As I look at the Notable Respondent Comments – the very first one “When it comes to hosting YOU really do get what you pay for. We use and highly recommend WP Engine.” Did I write that and not remember ? Cause that’s EXACTLY what I would have said WORD for WORD.
Ha ha. Certainly possible 🙂
Thanks!
The main disadvantage to not using cPanel is account portability. We recently were asked to retrieve someone’s hosting from WP Engine, and it was messy.
Is there a reason GoDaddy (Pro) Managed WordPress Hosting isn’t linked or specifically reviewed?
While you briefly mention it, the real story here is that GoDaddy is getting respect again within the development community. With exception to the Hosting Support category (they have absolutely incredible, award-winning, instant pickup phone support btw), GoDaddy ranks well in all categories AMOUNG THE TOUGHEST CRITICS, your audience that took this survey. This would have never been the case in past years.
GoDaddy also shoots a gaping hole in the conclusion that “you get what you pay for”. I pay $14.99/mo for speeds, reliability, support and features that more-than-compete with the typically recommended WP hosts. In price alone, all things being equal (they roughly are per this poll), GoDaddy is easily the winner IMO.
Great survey, but there is something important to note: each host really has a different target customer in mind.
SiteGround is great shared hosting.
Managed WP on GoDaddy is an upscale version with caching and backups WITH plugin restrictions
WP Engine is much higher end and costly for Dev/UAT/Prod workflow
That lens must be put on any consideration like this.