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Jeff Chandler

WPShout’s 2016 Webhosting Survey Results Show Specialized Hosts Are Doing Well

WPShout has published the results of its 2016 webhosting survey taken by 135 respondents. The results from this year’s survey show two trends.

First, average monthly spending increased sharply from last year. WPShout attributes the increase to either people spending more money on hosting or a different demographic taking the survey. Second, EIG owned hosts as a group scored poorly across the board, especially A Small Orange which was acquired in 2012.

Survey Results for EIG Owned Hosts
Survey Results for EIG Owned Hosts

A Small Orange received accolades in the 2014 survey but multiple outages in 2015 increased customer dissatisfaction.

GoDaddy’s results improved over last year but it still scores below other companies. In particular, customers commented that its managed WordPress offering is superior to its other hosting options.

GoDaddy 2016 Survey Results
GoDaddy 2016 Survey Results

Specialized webhosts continued their streak of doing well in the survey. Among the hosts that scored well across the board are Flywheel, Digital Ocean, Kinsta, and WP Engine.

Specialized Hosting Results
Specialized Hosting Results

I encourage you to read WPShout’s thorough breakdown of the results, trends noticed, and comments from respondents. Keep in mind that 135 people is a small sample size and therefore, the survey should not be used exclusively to make purchasing decisions.

If you need help selecting a WordPress hosting provider, check out this recent post by Chris Lema which includes 10 questions you should ask before choosing a host.

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13 responses to “WPShout’s 2016 Webhosting Survey Results Show Specialized Hosts Are Doing Well”

  1. Just wondering the math here… 135 self-selecting respondents is representative to how big a percentage of the WP community?

    • SiteGround is in the detailed analysis on WPShout. It was reviewed by the most people and still considered a solid choice.

  3. I bet WPengine’s numbers would be much lower if this survey was done right now. These were done in September. So, 8 months to get their act together.

  4. ASmallOrange had 10 days outage in the last week of December 2015 and first few days of January. Their support is almost non-existant (I waited for some tickets for days, and I am waiting 7 days still to my request to close the account).

    I moved to SiteGround, to a comparable hosting package to the previous one on ASmallOrange, and CPU/RAM usage is 6 times lower and the website is 2 times faster (or more even), and PHP7 is already available and working great.

    Problems with these surveys are the small number of reviewers used, but I think that it reflects well the current WordPress hosting choices.

  5. No mention of Pantheon.io? They are currently our go-to webhost if we can get clients to accept them because the offer true workflow and a container-based stack.

  6. I am using Godaddy managed WordPress hosting and all I can say that they really improve their performance. I never face any issues and No outage so far. I am happy with them.

  7. On a platform as large as WordPress, I don’t think 135 respondents is anywhere close to being statistically significant enough to draw conclusions on. I would like to see the results of a survey of several hundred users or more. However, this is a good start nonetheless.

  8. I’m glad other comments have said this before me, but this is not legit. Reporting host rating with as little as a single customer’s feedback is incredibly misleading, especially given some of these folks have millions of customers. Big, important players in the hosting space that are even WordCamp sponsors are missing (like Mike mentions Pantheon). In reporting the results without actually examining whether they’re worth reporting you’re perpetuating bad data and conclusions, the opposite of what journalism, WordPress-focused or otherwise, should do.

    • agree. Inspired by this idea we created the biggest web hosting survey up to date ( already 300+ answers ), hoping to reach at least 500 people. Won’t be perfect, however will be the best public resource of this kind and since we plan to share the csv with raw data, everybody can do their math :) .

  9. I run a specialist hosting company and have never had an outage. Does that me better than the hosts above? Maybe. Or maybe it just makes me different. Have I upset customers? Of course, the ones who think they can run a massive web app with trillions of hits on a cheap plan get upset when they get messaged. The thing with surveys like this is that only the complainers tend to say anything.
    We deliberately keep our client base small – that way we can install modules for customers, debug WordPress plugin conflicts etc for customers without their cries for help getting lost in a deluge.
    There is a lot to be said for a smaller hosting company we think.

  10. Seriously? The only thing a sampling this small shows is that 135 people like to be heard. And the only other conclusion to be drawn is that many of them needed to vent. I have 34 sites hosted on 3 different EIG brands for 9 years now and I have never had a problem yet.

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