There are a couple of interesting things in this chart. First, there’s the dynamic between GoDaddy and Bluehost in terms of raw popularity. Bluehost is much more popular than GoDaddy with USA customers and is about equally split between USA and non-USA. GoDaddy, on the other hand, is more than 2X more popular internationally than it is in the USA. In both situations, though, users are just about equally satisfied.
Another interesting note is Hostinger, which barely makes a blip in terms of USA popularity but is one of the most popular hosts with non-USA customers. What’s more, Hostinger’s international customers seem to be significantly more satisfied than those in the USA (though the sample size for the USA is too small to draw confident conclusions).
Overall, we can say that customers around the world all seem to be fairly evenly happy with their hosts…at least hosts that they’re paying money for. More on the free hosting conundrum later on.
👍 People are generally happy with their current hosting platform
The average rating given by the respondents was 7.6 / 10. This means that four of the top five most popular hosts in this WordPress hosting survey have scored above average ratings. In an odd twist of fate, the overall most popular host (GoDaddy) was the only one to fall below this average (at 7.36).
Interestingly, this overall score was a bit lower in our 2019 survey – at 7.4. Does this 0.2 increase mean that the WordPress hosting industry has upped its game? That I leave for you to decide. I wouldn’t jump to conclusions too soon – maybe our respondents were just in a better mood this year.
Another interesting note is that the most popular rating, by far, is a perfect ten. This makes sense – if most people didn’t love their hosting, they would probably have switched already, right?
For a more detailed breakdown, here’s the percentage of people who have rated their host a certain value:
| Rating | % of users |
|---|---|
| 10 | 34.37% |
| 9 | 13.03% |
| 8 | 15.76% |
| 7 | 10.61% |
| 6 | 5.62% |
| 5 | 8.61% |
| 4 | 2.50% |
| 3 | 2.16% |
| 2 | 1.80% |
| 1 | 2.99% |
The percentage of perfect ten ratings is almost identical to our 2019 survey, when it was 34.40%. That’s pretty wild when you consider both surveys are dealing with thousands of responses. In fact, the overall breakdown looks remarkably similar. Maybe there’s a psychology paper in there somewhere about how people give ratings on a ten-point scale?
💰⛔ People aren’t very satisfied with free WordPress hosting
If you’re on a budget, the concept of free WordPress hosting is pretty alluring. Being able to run a WordPress site without spending a dime? That’s tough to argue with.
However, it’s important to remember that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. In our post where we tested and examined free WordPress hosting, we found that it was fine for simple test environments, but not a good option for a serious website.
Our survey backs that data up, where users on free WordPress hosting were less satisfied than those using paid services. Despite that, there are still a significant number of people who do rely on free WordPress hosting – two free hosts made it into the top-15 most popular hosts in our survey, though neither cracked the top ten. Sometimes, budget trumps all.
| Host | Vote count | % of respondents | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| 000WebHost | 101 | 1.13% | 5.54 |
| InfinityFree | 66 | 0.74% | 6.80 |
We also tallied up the ratings for a number of free hosts that only got a few responses and the overall rating for free WordPress hosts was 6.08. This is well below the overall average satisfaction rating of 7.6 for all hosts. It’s also well below Namecheap at 8.35, which is one of the cheapest hosts on this list with regular price plans starting at just a few dollars per month.
With that being said, the ratings for free WordPress hosts also aren’t zero. If you’re willing to put up with a slightly worse experience, you still might find the promise of free WordPress hosting to be worth that trade-off.
Another interesting comparison is 000WebHost vs Hostinger because 000WebHost comes directly from the Hostinger family. Hostinger essentially uses 000WebHost as a marketing vehicle to drive users towards Hostinger’s paid plans. As you’d expect (and hope), paying Hostinger customers are a lot more satisfied than people using the free version:
| Host | Vote count | % of respondents | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| 000WebHost | 101 | 1.13% | 5.54 |
| Hostinger | 363 | 4.08% | 7.93 |
So, at least in these examples, it seems like you get what you pay for.
☯️ Is “WordPress” a host?
A lot of people said that “WordPress” is their host. This was also a popular response in the 2019 edition of our survey, which shows that it isn’t a fluke.
Unfortunately, we don’t know if what they mean is WordPress.com or if they confuse what a host actually is. We did get a decent number of answers specifically for WordPress.com (50 results), so WordPress.com is popular enough in its own right.
We’ve had a couple more answers like that. Here are some of them:
| “Who’s your host?” | # of answers |
|---|---|
| “WordPress” | 723 |
| “cPanel” | 17 |
| “Plesk” | 13 |
| “Blog” | 25 |
| “free” | 10 |
| “WooCommerce” | 7 |
| “Elementor” | 5 |
Perhaps what this proves more than anything else is how confusing the whole idea of hosting really is.
As pros, I believe that we absolutely can’t neglect the fact that WordPress isn’t as simple as we like to believe it is. Educating other casual users is key to helping them understand the platform and how to get the most out of it.
With WordPress running on 43.4% of all websites, it’s not surprising that a lot of users don’t have any knowledge or even interest in understanding the platform’s inner workings, or what makes one host better than the other.
Many casual users simply shop based on the price or based on the marketing messages that they see on the web. Many of them don’t even assume that one host might be slower or less reliable than the other.
This brings me to the next thing that we wanted to find out in this 2020 WordPress hosting survey:
🏎️ Is speed essential for users?
If you’re a WordPress pro, the performance of your servers is probably one of the key components of your overall satisfaction. But is it the same for everyone else? Do people really care that much?
While we did have a direct question on what people valued about their hosting setups, we’ve decided to go a step further here and actually use our own performance test data for making this analysis.
The following table reveals not whether people say that speed is important to them but instead focuses on the correlation between user ratings and real speed test data.
Based on this specific chunk of data, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation at all.
However, it’s worth pointing out that the loading times we get on our setups aren’t necessarily what other users get.
Let’s take a broader look at what people value the most:
⭐ What people value about their hosts
This was an optional question in this year’s WordPress hosting survey, but it still got 1400+ responses.
I think you can make a good guess what the no.1 most valued thing is, but let’s see the table anyway:
