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:
| # | Country | % of survey answers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | 29.46% |
| 2 | United Kingdom | 11.77% |
| 3 | India | 7.85% |
| 4 | Canada | 7.57% |
| 5 | Australia | 4.04% |
| 6 | Nigeria | 3.76% |
| 7 | Pakistan | 2.82% |
| 8 | South Africa | 2.27% |
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:
