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:
| 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:
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:
| # 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:
| # 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”:
| 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.
? What do the results of this WordPress hosting survey mean for us?
Companies like Bluehost or GoDaddy haven’t been the top recommendations among WordPress pros or developers. We usually point our users to offers like SiteGround or WP Engine. But should that indeed be the go-to hosting advice?
While me and you are probably not the target for, say, GoDaddy hosting, myriads of users around the globe seem to enjoy it just fine, and the rating given in our survey – 7.43 – is far from something we can consider bad.
Even though speed and performance was pretty high on our “what you value most” list, there are other factors that look to be much more important – chiefly price, support and customer service.
For most businesses, a basic brochure website is all they need, and for that purpose, most cheap hosts should be able to deliver.
But what do you think? Are you likely to recommend Bluehost or GoDaddy to someone looking for a WordPress host? Let us know in the comments.
? Get the data file of this WordPress hosting survey
Here’s the raw-data export in case you want to analyze the results on your own. Don’t forget to let us know if you find anything interesting!
If you’re interested in doing some deeper analysis, you can still get the data files from our previous surveys: 2016, 2017, 2018.
