In reply to Jasper.

Jasper, this was brought up in the WordPress Hosting facebook group and it’s a valid question and started a discussion there. I will post my response that I posted there:

“It definitely opens up an interesting can of worms this discussion. I was aware from the start they are a GridPane (partner? client? not sure what the right word is here). Since it was the enterprise tier, it’s very flexible in terms of offer and setup (the only tier where default setup isn’t a requirement). So I don’t need to go through a signup process, they can stand up whatever they like.
As far as who can participate, I’ve always been a bit flexible and stressed these are performance benchmarks and nothing else. They should be used in conjunction with other information about the quality of a company you’re dealing with. I can count on one hand the number of companies I would refuse to do business with because I try to be open and transparent to provide the best data. To provide the best data means working with almost anyone, even companies that have generally negative perceptions (EIG, GD, etc). I’ve received a lot of pushback about working with some of those companies but my response is, I deal with data. If you refuse to collect data on a company, how can you honestly measure it? How can you see if they are improving?
Now should a brand new company that is probably still organizing things be allowed in my benchmarks? Obviously I said it was ok this year because we’re having this discussion. I also let in Sailed.io which isn’t a company either. It’s an open source tool to setup Digital Ocean instances for WP. Konstantin Kovshenin and I talked about it and he wanted to see how Sailed.io stacked up against full hosting companies. I made a note about them but allowed it.
Next year, what would be the fair criteria for eligibility? I want to encourage as many companies as possible because I think more participation is better for everyone. I’m also open to non traditional participants given they are on somewhat fair footing (ala Sailed.io).
I don’t have an answer by the way, I am just putting my thoughts out loud and curious to hear what others think.”

I will reach out and see if they want to comment.