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Jeff Chandler

The Recommended Hosting Page on WordPress.org Starts Over From Scratch

One of the most difficult tasks for new WordPress users is choosing a good webhost. The process can involve getting recommendations from friends, searching Google for reviews, and taking advantage of trial offers. Since 2005, WordPress.org has had a recommended hosts page featuring companies that meet certain criteria.

WordPress.org Recommended Host Page in 2005
WordPress.org Recommended Host Page in 2005

Over the years, new companies would rarely be added to the page. For several years, Bluehost, DreamHost, and Laughing Squid were the only companies listed.

Recommend Hosts Page in 2014
Recommend Hosts Page in 2014

I’ve spoken to a number of people in the webhosting industry in the last two years and the general consensus is that, to get on the list, you need to pay Matt Mullenweg a lot of money, which isn’t true. Bluehost is often used as an example as they’re owned by Endurance International Group who invested in Automattic in 2014. Bluehost has been on the list since 2005, long before any investment took place.

A Fresh Start to The Recommended Hosts Page

Currently, Bluehost is the only recommended webhost on the page because it’s going through a revamp. Near the bottom of the page is a paragraph that admits a lot has changed in the industry over the years.

Much has changed in the hosting world since this page was originally set up. There are now many types of dedicated and cloud accounts that are as easy as shared hosting was a generation ago, and shared and managed hosts have evolved significantly to become more tailored to WordPress. WordPress is often now the most commonly used application on major web hosts!

I asked Mullenweg if hosts that were on the page before are eligible to be re-added, “Of course, anyone is up for consideration and Bluehost is up for being removed.”

The WordPress.org team is starting over from scratch and as such, webhosting companies are asked to complete the following survey by July 31st.

First Page of The Survey
First Page of The Survey

The survey is 40 questions long and includes questions such as:

  • What’s the WordPress-specific landing page you’d want /hosting to point to?
  • What type of customers do you target?
  • Please describe your technology stack, and why you like it.
  • Is 100% of the code included or promoted with your WordPress install GPL or compatible?

It may seem like a tedious process, but those I’ve spoken to in the past affiliated with companies once on the list say it generates thousands to millions of dollars in signups. This should motivate companies to complete the survey accurately. Even if a company is not listed on the page, those who fill out the survey will be giving WordPress.org a lot of information that may come in handy for other uses.

It’s About Time

The recommended hosting page is long overdue for a revamp. There are companies such as, A2 Hosting, Pagely, WP Engine, InMotion Hosting, and countless others that are doing a great job hosting large and small WordPress sites. Perhaps it’s time they become the ones recommended instead of the standard three. If you own or operate a webhosting company with an emphasis on WordPress, fill out the survey, as it’s the best chance you have to getting on the recommended hosts page.

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84 responses to “The Recommended Hosting Page on WordPress.org Starts Over From Scratch”

  1. I’m happy to see things are getting shifted around. I wrote about this a few years ago on the Site Care blog http://www.wpsitecare.com/why-wordpress-org-should-stop-endorsing-bluehost/ It’s needed to happen for a long time. Leaving up Bluehost is a little curious to me based on my experience with them over the years but a reconsideration of all the recommended providers is a good first step. Kudos to .org!

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  3. My biggest problem with hosting companies is they rarely actually know what they are talking about. Whenever I have had to work with Bluehost for a client website, they are typically very clueless. Many of the times the customer support doesn’t know what to do and instead I walk them through what to do and they don’t come across as very confident. THAT being said this is not just a Bluehost issue.

    This issue is being faced by every hosting company for the sole fact that 1. Being customer support is not a very gratifying job and the people can be rude. 2. There is not a lot of WordPress talent in those sectors. There is no host that can claim (even WP Engine and their “experts”) its an issue with not enough talent in the industry to supplement the spark in growth. WP Engine even admits this as a fault and its not the hosting companies fault.

    WordPress is in a unique position because of its market share. There are millions of WordPress powered websites.. A small fraction of those can run those websites optimally, and even less know how to troubleshoot, code, and solve other issues. So it’s such as spark in demand that it’s hard to well solve lol. Which lead people to go to a “managed” WordPress hosting which is completely expensive and a waste of money.

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    • Managed hosting isn’t a waste of money. Running a server just might not be what you’re doing as a company, or want to spend time/energy on. Once you factor in the daily backups and all other optimizations you get, the price isn’t too high either.

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    • Hi Scott, the way WP Engine addresses the issue you’re bringing up — that there’s not enough talent in WordPress support — is that we’ve built an entire internal training team and process. We have courses which last months, we have a process whereby new hires go through a classroom phase, then on the floor with experienced guides, plus a buddy, and methodically “graduate” until they’re on their own.

      So although we do agree with your premise that there’s not enough talent, we haven’t thrown up our hands or just claimed “we’re experts” and then put unknowledgeable people on the phone.

      We can’t be perfect, but we can heavily invest our time and money into our own people, and the careers of those people which they take with them even after leaving WP Engine, and that is something worth doing, and even celebrating.

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      • I can vouch for everything Jason just posted. I’ve seen and sat in on these courses and I’ve experienced the level at which they over-invest in their team. A WP Engine support engineer is incredibly well-trained and passionate about WordPress. “Expert” may take some time but often times they know as much or more than my team that’s been doing WordPress for over 10 years.

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        • I have to say that WP Engine is the best WordPress host I have found in my 10 years in the biz. Sure, they have their issues, but the level of support I have experienced with WP Engine is easily 10 times better than that I have experienced with other providers (mainly Bluehost, GoDaddy, and Hostgator). When I have had issues with hosting at WP Engine (and to be fair, there have been issues), the WP Engine support team has been light years ahead of the curve in terms of resolving those issues. They just seem to *care* more about finding solutions than the other companies I have worked with. I rarely feel brushed off like I do when working with other hosting companies’ support teams.

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          • Mostly you need support just where something does not work well. I prefer hosting what works and don’t need support during whole year.
            It is not advantage that support staff answer your question “Why smtp does not work’ with, “We blocked smtp port …” or that they have some issue with something so your site is slow.
            Good host do things the way, that you don’t need to ask these question, bc. everything works well.

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  4. I look forward to the coming results. With regard to the hosting page as it’s been for years, I always thought that was more or less quid pro quo, so I’ve always ignored it. And I’m saying this as a huge fan of Matt Mullenweg.

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  6. A word of warning if you’re planning to use reviews in your decision-making process: many of the so-called review sites are actually sponsored by the hosting companies in question.

    Apologies if this is already widely known. It tripped me up the first time.

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  7. I have one site I host on http://inmotionhosting.com, but I’ve moved seven other sites to http://bigscoots.com. I was getting account overage notifications every other day on In Motion, and In Motion just displays an aggregate usage for all sites. Since moving to Big Scoots, I’ve had only three times in the last sixty days I maxed out my CPU allowance. And, Big Scoots has a much more granular usage graph so you can pinpoint where the problem is if you have one. One more thing: Big Scoots tech support walked me through passwording my wp-admin area which eliminated the hundreds of hacking login attempts I was getting under In Motion. That alone saved my life.

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  8. I’m really embarrassed that Bluehost is on that list, and TBH I’m blown away that WP Tavern is hosted with them. They are, IMO, they worst hosting provider that exists. I can’t tell you how many times, that I STILL SEE “error establishing database connection.” I was with those guys years ago, for a long time, and am really thankful that I finally left.

    I use Lightning Base for most of my hosting these days, because their incredibly inexpensive, the support is fast (and on weekends, and on 8 am on a sunday), and have never once had an issue with them. $9 for solid state hosting with amazing support; can’t beat that.

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    • Thanks for covering the hosting recommendations issue Jeff.

      Like Nick, I was astonished to learn that WPtavern is hosted at BlueHost. You must have a very special account (I guess when the horse trading is in the hundreds of thousands, anything can be made available). We have regularly had to migrate moderately busy sites away from BlueHost for clients, as BlueHost just times out your visitors for say twenty minutes an hour after a certain level of traffic.

      There’s nothing worse a host can do than deliberately make your site seem slow and regularly down. As Herp pointed out, WordPress.org/Automattic recommending Bluehost for money pretty much blows a hole in the sanctimony of:

      I have forgone profit for principles many times and been lucky pretty much every time…

      My moral compass is spinning again. Dirty money to recommend bad hosting is okay. 95% GPL code is not good enough for Wordcamp. I wonder how Matt Mullenweg keeps it all straight in his head.

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  9. This is a good opportunity for hosting companies. Personally, I’d like to see hosts rotate on the page quarterly. There’s plenty of awesome hosts that are invested in WordPress and deserve a shot. Also, as the hosts gain more referral traffic, they’re more likely to keep investing in WordPress long term.

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  10. A good list of WordPress supporting hosts (recommended or not) would be very useful. If I were looking for a free theme or plugin at WordPress.org I would be seeing much more information than WordPress.org provides on hosts yet selecting a host is a much more serious decision than selecting a theme or plugin. There is no information about what constitutes a good host or the minimum standards for inclusion in the list. No star rating. No FAQ. No indication if the information is out of date. All I see is a forum link leading to people’s personal problems and a short statement that looks like it was provided by the vendor. Furthermore, listing only one host looks bogus and reflects poorly on the credibility of WordPress.org. Even the bogus sites that Captain Black correctly warns against do a better job at providing useful information than WordPress.org does. I think it is imperative to take this page offline until it meets some minimum quality standards.

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  11. I use Big Scoots for simple projects (shared hosting) and Wired Tree for VPS – small new companies with new hardware and very good support.

    I changed companies already several times. Usually when they just start they are good, but when user base starts to grow rapidly, not every company can handle it. Sometimes it is a conscious choice – they would opt for “simple” users and would drive away other users who have “too many” questions or requests.

    Usually new companies provide much better support, because they are trying to earn good name, old companies on the other hand are used to rest on laurels…

    Other thing is hardware – once company is established, usually it tries to get as much use of the hardware and as long as possible, that’s why when you use one company for 5 or more years, you realize that other people are using bullet trains, and you’re still commuting with Metra :)

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  12. Thanks to Jeff for bringing this issue up. I have always wondered how companies got on that “recommended hosts” list. It has, as far as I can tell, provided a disservice to the WordPress ecosystem in that it has promoted some of the worst (imho) hosts.

    Jeff, I am stunned that Bluehost has been working great for you! If it works, don’t fix it! …but that hasn’t been my experience with Bluehost. :)

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  13. I’ve found the hosting “fight” to be much ado about nothing. I have built and hosted over 500 sites for clients on every hosting platform you can imagine. Major issues? Next to none on any platform and the few issues I have happen from time to time on every hosting platform.

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  14. I’ve noticed that page at .org a long time ago and never seen it change or get updated. I was always questioning it because of who was listed. The unfortunate issue is that so many people make choices based on host review sites, and in many cases, they are not real reviews, but people still put a lot of emphasis on their decisions based on what they see in a review.

    I have written an article about how to find a web host http://www.shapedpixels.com/blog/how-to-find-the-right-web-host and within the article, I even say I don’t like to recommend hosts, but still hope it helps an individual or business find a quality host.

    Regarding the .org’s revamp of the hosting page, it will be interesting to see what they do with that page, but most of all, see who they put into the list.

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  16. I’ve updated the post with additional info from Matt Mullenweg.

    I asked Mullenweg if hosts that were on the page before are eligible to be re-added, “Of course, anyone is up for consideration and Bluehost is up for being removed.”

    This truly means that everyone is up for consideration and that those who were on the page before are up for reconsideration.

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  17. I would guess that from here on out, things like participation in “5 for the future” and customer satisfaction would be big factors in what hosts would be chosen for the list. A2 Hosting like other hosts has been working to improve the performance of WordPress along with the customer experience from start to finish including installing, usage, and knowledgable support. Other participation is also huge in the community, from sponsoring, volunteering and speaking at WordCamps to helping people at local Meetups.

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  21. What do people think of hosts listed on that page getting badges the indicate their current involvement and contributions to the WP community, like we do on .org profiles?

    ie. A badge for being a multi-event wordcamp sponsor. A badge for committing to 5 for the future. A badge for dedicated WordPress support personnel,

    Nothing crazy, and nothing too “tiered”. I don’t necessarily want to see “WP Engine donated $X” and “Page.ly donated $Y”. The badges should be booleans either they qualify for the badge or they don’t, no ranking, or gold, silver, bronze BS.

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  22. Curiously, the third paragraph has been edited from its first posting…

    https://web.archive.org/web/20150630130838/https://wptavern.com/the-recommended-hosting-page-on-wordpress-org-starts-over-from-scratch

    Its a subtle change but really changes the message in the paragraph. Almost seems like a freudian slip.

    Moreso, what does it matter if Bluehost was on that page before EIG’s investment? That doesn’t preclude Bluehost from paying for placement. With Bluehost being one of a select few on both WP.org and Drupal’s recommended hosts for 5+ years (10 on WP), do you really think Drupal and WP aren’t being incentivized to do so?

    Taking this a step further, with the unearthing of The Foundation’s legal actions against Pagely (first noted here https://wptavern.com/the-wordpress-foundation-sues-jeff-yablon-for-trademark-infringement#comment-69733) for offering “WordPress hosting” it makes even more sense now as to why they did that. The advertisers wanted to protect their interests as the only hosts for WP and used The Foundation as a proxy to do so, to protect their revenue stream.

    Its convenient to try and sweep this under the rug as “the page hasn’t been updated in some time”. Really, with how much talk there is of “transparency” and “for the good of the community”, its sort of egg-on-face to admit to it. The disingenuity of the whole thing is tiresome.

    Seems like an appropriate time to add this to the discussion:

    I have forgone profit for principles many times and been lucky pretty much every time…

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    • Yes, I added the “which isn’t true” part to the paragraph because some readers didn’t understand that it’s not true even though I provided evidence that indicates it’s not true. If WordPress is being incentivized by hosts, there’s been no public record I know of that says so.

      I’m surprised you didn’t mention the fact that early on, the links on the recommended hosting page were affiliate links so WordPress.org or perhaps just Matt received kickbacks. Those were removed sometime after though.

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    • Pagely was/is being sued? False.

      However there was a simple 2 or 3 response email thread between the Foundation and ourselves when we filed our Pagely® trademark. Quickly resolved, everyone moved on.

      You cannot use a trademarked term when filing a trademark. In our case the language we submit for our trademark “hosting of open source software applications, namely WordPress” is entirely accurate, although could not be used as it infringed on another’s trademark.

      Easy peezy fix.

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      • @Strebel,

        Herp didn’t say “sued.” He talked of “legal actions,” which, as the Patent and Trademark Office records show, is entirely accurate. Please don’t attempt to correct an inaccuracy that didn’t exist.

        If you do wish to clarify things, could you, perhaps, explain why there were, in fact, TWO proceedings filed by the Foundation against Pagely? They were three months apart. How does that fit with there being “a simple 2 or 3 response email thread between the Foundation and ourselves”?

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  23. I attempted to submit through the 40 question Hosting Company survey, but the form appears to be broken.

    No feedback upon clicking the Finished button.
    The page just refreshes without the expected “thank you” page or text. And I received no “we received your survey” email as expected.

    My suspicion is that current submissions go nowhere…

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  24. Sad to read suggestions that listing on the Recommended Hosting Page should depend on bribes. If a vendor participates in some WP program or does other good deeds that should be reflected on whatever page applies to that program, not the Recommended Hosting Page. To do otherwise destroys the credibility of the page.

    The Recommended Hosting Page should be based on objective criteria/features that are useful to WP site admins. For example: dedicated WP support staff; hours of availability; specific WP help files; built-in backups and snapshots; security features; built-in caching; ease of copying sites for testing/development; frequency of WP updates; PHP versions supported; ability to withstand DOS attacks; etc. I’m sure this group can quickly develop a list of useful features that make an admin’s job easier.

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  25. Thankfully, when someone hires a developer, hosting enters the discussion and we get a chance to educate them as part of the process. In 6 years, I’ve had fewer than 10 clients not willing to migrate and 2 of them were because they had too many sites.

    Hosting for me, and many other developers, has been a journey.

    As HUGE of a fan of WPE as I am, no one host is a perfect solution for every single client, so when you reach a certain point, you have to realize minute differences and curate for your clients.

    I do hope the new .org page provides more than stats on what an account includes and recommends hosts that default to PHP 5.5 and higher. People coming to WP who look on that page are unlikely to have legacy coding that needs PHP 5.2 or 5.3, so offer those who are above the curve, not meeting minimums – that is a disservice for security, performance, and potentially placing people into a need to migrate earlier than is reasonable.

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    • To be honest, WordPress.org could be a bit more pro-active here. There are well known good WordPress hosts, each with their own niche talents. They include names like A Small Orange (includes email), WP Engine (lots of built in tools, ability to scale albeit at a price though much lower than WordPress VIP), Kinsta (built-in load balancing across continents), Synthesis (Studiopress expertise) to name just a few with whom we’ve worked successfully. Shouldn’t WordPress do the search themselves?

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  29. As someone who has finally been bitten hard more than once by the post-EIG buyout bugs at Hostgator, I’m happy to add Lightning Base to the list of new hosts to check out to move the rest of my client sites over to!

    And yes, given the influence of WordPress.org over the WP community at large, they should do the right thing and remove themselves from recommending hosting companies.

    Running a yearly survey of WP users of different levels to find out what companies the users trust is a different beast… having something like that be public and widely available for participation might make some of these companies keep on their toes.

    I’d view it as a valuable resource, much like that list of hosting companies that have been bought up by EIG is a wonderful guide on which companies to avoid if at all possible :)

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    • Hear, hear, Summer. That’s a great idea to do an annual survey of users for recommended webhosts. If WordPress.org wanted to slant the survey towards more experienced users, they could limit it to listed plugin authors with at least one plugin of over 1000 active installs (the installs limitation would be to discourage hosting companies from putting up bogus plugins to be able to distort the survey: rats will try to get into every ship).

      Here’s a resource to help avoid EIG companies (it’s astonishing how many great hosting companies EIG has cost-cut into horror films): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group

      Hold on – the Wikipedia page no longer offers the list of EIG brand. If EIG orchestrate this takedown, it was very clever. Apparently EIG also removed the page from their own website listing most of their brands.

      Fortunately there is a hero out there who has put together the full list in of EIG properties, Michael Bely.

      There was one surprise on that list even for me (and I thought I knew the EIG brands): A Small Orange.

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  30. As Alec Has pointed out… It is surprising that A Small Orange is a part of EIG. But when it comes to the quality of service, I no longer have any websites hosted with ASO I must say I have had no major issues with them during the time I had purchased their webhosting service. The Best thing is that their customer support system works. Unlike a few others… with whom I have had some really bad experience.

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  31. I’m seeing a lot of hate on the big hosts (Godaddy, EIG, etc), but the truth is that they mediate the experience for many millions of active WordPress installations, and the work they’ve done around upgrades has been probably the biggest improvement to the WordPress ecosystem overall the past 5 years. I also try out these sites myself, as Jeff mentioned earlier Tavern used to be hosted on Dreamhost, and is now on Bluehost. I help out family and friends with .org installs on a pretty wide variety of hosts, and sometimes even call up support or livechat myself to ask questions and see what the experience is like. I also get hundreds of emails a year on the host feedback address. I read tons of hosting threads on our support forums.

    A very small % of new WordPress users are going to set up PHP/MySQL/etc themselves, so the host is key to their experience.

    But there are a lot I’m not familiar with, and I’m interested in giving a fresh look to a wide variety hosts big and small that will help assist in giving folks a fantastic WordPress experience with complete flexibility to use any plugin, theme, or custom code. The ultimate result will of course be completely subjective, but I want to give everyone a fair and well-informed consideration regardless of whether they’ve been in the WP community a long time or not, and the survey gives us a big head start. Hopefully we can have a process that becomes streamlined enough we can re-do it every 12-24 months, giving both old and new entities a chance to be highlighted.

    I’m sure I missed some questions in the survey though, and it’s still a very English-centric system. I’d like to figure out in the future how to highlight hosts that meet our quality bar in other languages, and at different price points than just the $5-15 of typical shared hosting.

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    • With no disrespect intended, Matt, I can’t believe you really know what the BlueHost experience is like. It’s great if your site has no visitors. Your site will be quite slow normally and will go down under load. While at GoDaddy the technical problems appear to have improved, there are serious ethical issues. Do you, we, WordPress develoeprs really support elephant hunting?

      Surely WordPress.org can do better than recommend EIG. The argument above is that WordPress.org/Automattic was selling the spots to the highest bidder.

      Like so many aspects of WordPress and Wordcamp, there seems to be an incredible hypocrisy and cynicism setting into the idealistic dreams of our youth. Whether it’s Jetpack trying to whack as many premium plugin areas as it can in a borg like bundle, barring long term WordPress developers from Wordcamp after years of sponsorship and participation (our case), core developers bullying the community (the menu customizer debacle), there seems to be no end to recent disillusionment.

      Hopefully at least with the hosting section, we can try to get back on the high ground.

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      • You can’t buy your way onto that page. It’s editorially driven and chosen. Inclusion and ranking will be driven by who I think is best for its audience, not anything commercial.

        I think you missed the part where this very site, which gets plenty of traffic, is hosted on Bluehost. Check out Jeffro’s comment above.

        On the elephant / Godaddy thing — yes that was terrible. (And don’t forget SOPA!) It was also four years ago, and the entire management has changed since then. Is it fair to penalize an organization of thousands of people for something so far in the past, done by people no longer there? Just like people deserve second chances, so do organizations.

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        • I don’t know about you Matt but I haven’t seen much repentance from GoDaddy or largest shareholder Bob Parsons:

          “The tribal authorities requested that I and others like me patrol the fields before and during the harvest”.[62] He also said that by shooting leopards and elephants, he has been helping the local population.

          Based on real world experience on client sites with moderate traffic, I don’t believe WP Tavern is hosted on a normal BlueHost account or server. I’ve checked, the Tavern is in the Provo data center where the BlueHost home page is also hosted. BlueHost’s own website would have to be on a very special server as well.

          ***

          I’d like to thank you by the way, personally, for kicking Foliovision out of Wordcamp Slovakia after three years of Gold and Silver sponsorship, presenting and media support (2013, 2014, 2015). We understand and appreciate your high ethical standards. Apparently our 2% of non-GPL code negates ten years of financial and code contribution to WordPress and open source. But that debate is for another day: today is a summer Friday (evening here in Europe).

          Have a great weekend all! Vita brevis, carpe diem.

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        • I’m with you on this Matt, specifically GoDaddy. I am a huge animal advocate and back then I wasn’t a big fan for several reasons, and that certainly drew the line for me.

          But also, a bit over a year ago I started watching them more closely again, on part due to seeing people I knew and trust start changing their minds. So I kept listening and keeping an open mind. I even had a nice chat with someone from GoDaddy awhile back on my concerns.I also tried their hosting again for a site I was working on. It took some time but fast forward, I am a big supporter of GoDaddy now. A lot has changed and you are so right, people deserve a second chance. One should never say never. :)

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          • Remember, GoDaddy bought Media Temple (I had guessed that it was because they couldn’t get the issues with their own hosting infrastructure to work efficiently). I’d worked on client sites in the past that took twice as long to get done because the database server would randomly stop responding, and the management interface was the most convoluted and unintuitive thing I’d ever seen.

            My guess would be that they’ve started putting newer accounts on servers in the new infrastructure instead of their old one. But that’s just an unfounded guess… I still would never use GoDaddy for the basic hosting tiers though, based on the performance issues I’ve seen with WordPress, Drupal and basic HTML/CSS sites.

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        • What is seriously bothering me about WordPress right now, is that there appear to be different ethical standards applied to Automattic, Jetpack, certain favoured developers and yourself than to third party developers. This hosting payola issue is just a symptom.

          As many have said before, it’s the third party developers who built WordPress and Automattic into the monolith that it is now. What you did very well for a long time is make it easy for us to do so.

          It would be great to see that positive and open atmosphere and energy return.

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          • And here, I thought you were out for the weekend ;-)

            In all seriousness Alec, I like you. I like your passion. I respect your technical chops and your contributions towards the community and the project.

            What *is* out of place are the false accusations, speculation, F.U.D., and general disrespect towards folks in the community. Your ability to assess intent, political motive, and ethics are far lacking your technical skills. Perhaps you could resolve to go back to coding (for whatever platform you find best) and leave the para psychology to the mystics.

            Listen… we get it. You don’t feel fairly treated. I can accept that as a message. If you seriously would like to see a positive and open atmosphere (to return, as you put it) please consider how you could be more constructive in that effort. I assure you that the path you have currently chosen to take, will not lead towards that goal.

            Enjoy the weekend, my friend.

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          • I think it’s clear you have an axe to grind and issues much larger than what we’re talking about here. I’m sorry that your experience in the WP ecosystem or with the organizations I lead has been so negative, and I do hope it gets better. I stand by only wanting to promote 100% GPL plugins and themes from WordCamps and WordPress.org.

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        • Everyone deserves a second chance, sure. However, over the years, some of us have given third, fourth, and fifth chances to GoDaddy and gotten burned.

          Just a year or two ago, my site was hacked. They argued with me that I was running WP 2.5 instead of the latest 3.x (whatever the latest was at the time) I was on. Instead of taking some responsibility (turned out it was their issue), they argued that’s why I was hacked.

          Just a week ago, I had another issue. They locked me out of my hosting account, locked down permissions on specific files that would allow me to fix the issue, and threatened to deactivate my service if I didn’t fix it. While I’d certainly fix the issue on my end (given the appropriate permissions to my files), threatening to deactivate a service is not the way you treat customers. You work with them to fix issues. I even had to argue with them that they locked me out of my hosting account. Fortunately, after asking for a supervisor on the phone, he had enough sense to at least get me back in.

          S*** happens, as they say. That, I can deal with. I can even deal with their periodic upsell phone calls.

          However, treating customers like crap is not how we do things down here in the South. I don’t know how they do it wherever GoDaddy is from.

          So, if you’re taking a vote: -1 to GoDaddy.

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          • With all respect, I am not sure if “treating customer like crap” are right words in this case. It looks you treated your outdated site like that.
            If people use non-secure app, its not host fault. Hosting company has to protect their environment from non-secure code that this will not impact other users. Its shared source.
            So I can understand if some app has some issue, they block it and its user responsibility to repair it. Just my thought.
            Also I still don’t understand why user ask and hosting company provide support by phone in 2015.

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          • I also didn’t realize that phones were no longer a legitimate form of communication in 2015. Maybe they shouldn’t have a “support” phone number if that’s the case. Granted, I only had to call after waiting over 24 hours for a response via email.

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          • In no way was I running outdated software. If you will go back and read what I wrote, you’ll see that I said I was running the latest version of the software at the time, even though they insisted that I was running 2.5. If you have any idea of who I am, you’d probably realize that I wouldn’t be running WP 2.5 just a year or so ago. I’m not some new user who just started running his first site.

            Sorry about the double comment. Copy/Paste fail. :)

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          • I am sorry for misunderstanding. Anyway if site is hacked or some trouble are in app, similar experience are with majority of hosting companies. They just don’t provide so high level of support, otherwise these packages are not few $ but few hundreds of $.
            You know the best what was problem there, I don’t know how much you paid for that service, but you just probably got what you paid for :)
            I don’t defend GoDaddy or any shared hosting. It would be just cool if people realize that shared hosting for few $ are the lowest level for host their sites and they can not expect “premium” service or support there. I think you did not expect that if you use shared hosting, they will take care of you one-one anytime you need them and they will fix everything fast.
            If some company offer unlimited and free everything it means also unlimited troubles, not just respond time from support :) With your experience I hope you know about that.

            How was mentioned above and below and everywhere around :) we will find similar experience with every hosting company – good and bad (I think that from 13 millions of GoDaddy customers we will find some satisfied with opposite experience that yours are).

            Important is to find some well balanced and stable hosting recommendation for that page, that it will helps new users to deploy their site affordable, fast and without trouble.

            If you or anybody else use something like Digital Ocean/Linode/Amazon or some top managed WordPress hosting companies … sure service from Dady or Mamy looks just ridiculously …. but still these Dady Mamy will be better solution for majority of users.

            Find right hosting is like find right theme, not so easy ;) especially with poison from affiliate marketing everywhere.

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          • Again, there was no issue on my end when the site got hacked. Everyone’s site on that server was hacked. What I was using was irrelevant. The technology is irrelevant. The point isn’t about that. The point is that a company shouldn’t have an issue and attempt to place the blame on the customer, especially when the customer isn’t at fault.

            My entire comment (the original comment above) is about how you treat your customers. It doesn’t matter if the customer is paying $1 or $1,000. You treat people with respect. And, you treat them like they just paid you some money.

            This isn’t a technical problem. It’s not a dollars problem. It’s a how you treat people problem.

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          • Speaking of recent experience…

            For years we had a policy at Foliovision that we would not work on sites at GoDaddy and we would refuse to take migration clients who insisted on GoDaddy hosting. We’d heard about this reformed GoDaddy and decided to relax the rules this month.

            Our work started with hosting which was down due to badly configured nameservers (GoDaddy had done the configuration and the domains were with GoDaddy). Forty five minutes of live chat later, this issues was fixed a day later. No problem.

            When we finally got the site up, functionality went missing. Half an hour of chat later, we found out that a plugin had been disabled. No pro-active notice on plugin removal, just pulled and you’re left to find and interrogate chat. While this plugins can take a lot of CPU if misconfigured, when carefully configured, it does not use much CPU.

            Yesterday (on Friday), the site just stopped working altogether for reasons unknown. Now (just now) it appears to be up, but with all the images missing. Needless to say, our client is less than happy.

            GoDaddy is back on the Foliovision banned hosts list (BlueHost is only on the banned list for high traffic sites).

            Justin, I’m surprised that you would be reckless enough to host anything with GoDaddy. You do need high traffic allowances of course which GoDaddy does offer. But with your tech chops, I think you’d be better off with either a Linode or a Digital Ocean VPS. Fo server software, try Litespeed free which allows you up to five virtual hosts for a trouble-free speedy server with a nice GUI to manage the server or VPS version if you want support and more virtual hosts (Apache is slow and maintaining nginx is not worth it for a single server). Linodes are really easy to reboot, upscale/downscale, back up.

            If you want really inexpensive US based shared hosting, the best we’ve found is MDDhosting.com (a small operation out of Indiana with a personal touch). Of the big names with whom we’ve worked regularly, LiquidWeb has given us less grief than most. Hostroute over here in Europe has been pretty good (ten years and counting). I’m not including any of the expensive WordPress managed hosts without email right now (WP Engine, Pagely, Synthesis, Kinsta, etc…) as they are in another budget category.

            We have been building or working on over two hundred different sites per year on a variety of hosts around the world for the last six or seven years and do considerable testing so our experience is based on a wide variety of platforms.

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          • Very good feedback to have in mind as we look at the next iteration of the page, and thank you for sharing.

            One thing that worked well in the previous iteration of the page is having hosts monitor their tag in the forums, and I would forward complaints that would come in via the feedback email directly to management. These were always handled quickly and in a way I thought was fair. If they weren’t, the host would risk being removed from the page.

            They haven’t applied yet via the survey, so it might not even be an issue. (Though I think a lot are working on things to have better answers to questions and submitting their response right before the deadline.)

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  32. The Wikipedia page for EIG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group used to be a useful resource, but it has been stripped of much it once contained. Click on the “Talk” tab to see how it was attacked with bogus misinterpretations of Wikipedia rules to remove the list you cite and other historic information. I used to join such “discussions” but it is futile for one person vs. a corporation that wants to suppress information. Wikipedia’s “reviewing administrators” seem unsympathetic to making the page useful. So I guess the WP Hosting Page situation is not that unique — money and power talk with a loud voice.

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  34. @KTS915 couldn’t reply above so doing so here.

    Actually it was no one specific reason that brought me back. A long culmination of time which was a result of hearing how others were viewing the “newer” GoDaddy, having met some of the people there that were willing to listen, and then just watching what changes and efforts they were making. Also, my own testing of the service.

    And not sure what you mean by the second part as I never said newcomers shouldn’t have a chance. I don’t think anyone, whether a new host or an established host should be given any other chance over anyone else. And decisions of my own are based on my own criteria :)

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    • @BobWP,

      Thanks. I know you didn’t mention second chances (Matt did) but, when I’ve heard comments like yours before, the idea that “everyone deserves a second chance” is usually not far away. Which always makes me concerned that, once a person or institution has somehow become part of an inner circle (in whatever walk of life) they seem to be able to have the freedom to do a lot of inexcusable things when others don’t.

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      • Yeah, in a perfect world everyone deserves a second chance, but I don’t take it literally. Each situation is different and each person will reconsider based on what is important to them.

        As far as the inner circle, well, yeah, unfortunately that’s how some things work for some people. Myself, I don’t play that game and am lucky enough to be in a position where I don’t have to. But I understand what you are saying….

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  35. In regards to discussion about GoDaddy I am not big fan of shared hosting at all, bc. it just does not perform well and my criteria are different. Anyway its probably still one of the best option as hosting solution for majority of users who just start building website for many reasons such as support, automatics tools and stable environment (even if this can not perform so well as some cloud/cdn solutions)
    Anyway just few months ago I moved/registered tens of .eu and .com domains thru several the biggest domain registrars.
    After many troubles with each registrar I found GoDaddy as the easiest, trouble-free and as bonus also the cheapest answer for my needs. It just works for anything what I needed without one support question or email.

    Sure everyone have different needs/expectations and budget … for users who manage/build and hosts sites longer time, who have experience and tried more hosting companies … “hosting page on .org” is probably not the source where to find a solution for host website.

    It has to be for people who need it and that is place for the most stable and WordPress friendly, well balanced hosting … probably not the cutting edge technology or very focused hosting solutions.

    I think for us who are satisfied with hosting what we are using, it does not matter if company A or company B will be listed there. It matters for those who have no idea about hosting issue.

    Maybe some kind of category can help there, but it can confuse users too.

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  36. Just a final thought here… as I look through the comments, and any comments on any post about hosting. In the end, hosting is very objective. Everyone has different opinions and experiences based on their own needs… just so many variables.

    I remember years back I was talking with a couple of people. One said “xxxx hosting sucks, nothing but bad luck all the time and issues and lousy support” and the other person about the same hosting “been using xxxx hosting for 9 years, best hosting I ever had”.

    I think any of us would be very lucky to sit down at a table with a group of people and everyone would agree. :)

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  38. The survey was completed on 31st July 2015. Its been over two months and still the recommended hosts page has not been updated. Maybe because this involves a deep study of the webhosts who have taken the survey. But I have questions…. the recommended hosts page says that the process of revamping the page is going on…great…. but why BlueHost alone is present form the older list..??? why not the other two (DreamHost and Laughing Squid)….???? Why these two webhosts were removed…. Why not to leave the list as it is until new recommended hosts take over….?????

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