According to data from W3Techs, more than 40% of all websites are built on WordPress. Therefore, it’s no surprise that WordPress hosting has skyrocketed in popularity recently and hosting providers have proliferated. With so many choices, it’s important to understand just how reliable WordPress hosts are, especially when it comes to downtime. Web hosting downtime can have significant consequences such as business loss, brand damage, and missed opportunities.
To evaluate which WordPress hosts are the most reliable, we analyzed historical data on all downtime events for each WordPress hosting provider between 2021-01-01 and 2022-09-30, as well as the duration of these downtime events. To get our results we used historical data from our own product, StatusGator, which aggregates data from official status pages to create team status pages. Our unique dataset gives us the ability to understand the reliability of commonly used WordPress hosts.
To see which WordPress hosts we found the most reliable, view our ranking below. To read more about the methodology used in this study and the details surrounding the reliability of each host, continue reading.
Our Ranking
This chart shows a number of hosting-related downtime events vs hosting-related downtime duration for the WordPress hosting providers.
Our final ranking is based on the lowest hosting-related downtime duration per year.
| Rank | Provider | Incidents/Year | Downtime/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kinsta | 2.3 | 3:41:19 |
| 2 | LiquidWeb | 0.6 | 6:25:41 |
| 3 | WP Engine | 4.1 | 14:06:18 |
| 4 | Flywheel | 9.9 | 31:34:52 |
| 5 | Cloudways | 2.9 | 45:10:07 |
| 6 | Hostinger | 36.0 | 57:40:43 |
| 7 | Dreamhost | 25.9 | 87:05:12 |
| (Unranked) | GoDaddy | 0.0 | 0:00:00 |
| (Unranked) | Anchor Host | 0.8 | 0:41:50 |
| (Unranked) | HostPress | 0.0 | 0:00:00 |
DISCLAIMER: Because we have partial data for some providers, we averaged and normalized this data to an annualized basis. We did not include every single event from each provider’s status page, but rather manually analyzed each event description and filtered to those that impacted availability.
In addition to the 7 hosts in our ranking, we didn’t include 3 WordPress hosts despite monitoring them. These were GoDaddy, Anchor Host, and HostPress. More information on why we did not include these hosts in our ranking can be found below.
Our Detailed Ranking
For more detailed opinions and justifications for our ranking, continue reading below.
Position #1 – Kinsta
Kinsta deserves our top ranking for a few reasons, the driving one being that Kinsta has the lowest average downtime period across all our tested WordPress hosts. They have a high number of clear and detailed status updates, all compiled within a straightforward and detailed status page, which also includes geographical downtime information that’s valuable to potential subscribers. Furthermore, Kinsta’s technical infrastructure appears both modern and robust, and, whilst we didn’t test aspects of their infrastructure, we were impressed with their detailed ‘why us’ page.
To expand, the first notable aspect of Kinsta’s infrastructure description would be that it is hosted via Google Cloud servers on a premier tier subscription. Alongside this, Kinsta claims they are one of the fastest WordPress hosts out there. While we don’t have data to support this statement, their utilization of the most up-to-date PHP versions and Nginx as their web server leads us to believe you can expect speed from Kinsta. Fast-loading websites not only reduce bounce rate but also increase conversion, making speed a critical factor for online success. Kinsta also has its own CDN, and, whilst we can’t personally guarantee it, we’re reassured that their high traffic and wide global network made up of 32 servers can be handled efficiently.
Technical details aside, their ‘MyKinsta’ dashboard also offers a WordPress-specific set of features and tools for your own use, which is a smart move from Kinsta since not all WordPress hosts offer WordPress-specific panels and instead opt for more generic tools such as cPanel.
Kinsta’s technical infrastructure does sound reliable in our opinion, but just how dependable is Kinsta as a WordPress host?
Kinsta Status Page Features
Kinsta’s status page is toward the top of the list in regard to transparency, content and reliability. Kinsta claimed 1014 status changes over 635 days, and, whilst we can’t guarantee they don’t miss any incidents, such a high number (and a higher number than most its competitors) of status changes with clear and detailed messages reassure us that Kinsta is largely transparent with any issues or downtime. In regard to visual aspects, you can easily view the operational status of Kinsta for the past 90 days in a location of your choice, as well as an option to view historical uptime data for the past 90 days. Each disruption has adequate information regarding what was disrupted, what has been done to resolve the issue, any investigations or monitoring taking place as well as its current status.
Whilst Kinsta’s status page contains all the details needed to understand its downtime and other technical issues, there is one improvement that could be made. There are different colors for different downtime events (with color ranges between amber and red) with no clear key as to what they indicate. It could be the severity level of each event, but we can’t know this. More clarification here would be beneficial.
Kinsta Hosting Reliability
In regard to hosting capabilities, Kinsta’s downtime duration seems significantly lower than its competitors, and, of that downtime, only a proportion of events actually impacted users’ websites.
This is reflected through analysis of our own data, which is summarized below to illustrate Kinsta’s downtime impact.
| Downtime Events Per Year | Total Number of Downtime Events | Total Duration of Downtime | Number of Hosting-Related Downtime Events | Duration of Downtime Affecting Hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.3 | 11 | 11:43:46 | 4 | 3:41:19 |
From our data, both Los Angeles and South Carolina had the longest downtime events:
- Los Angeles = 5:40:13
- South Carolina = 1:24:45
These times were the actual downtime duration for the last 635 days, and, were the two longest downtime events recorded for Kinsta. That said, the calculated downtime for users hosting elsewhere (Oregon, London, etc.) was 0:39:58, which is an impressive number compared to other WordPress hosts in this list.
Kinsta Overall
This is an impressive performance from Kinsta #1, and, whilst only LiquidWeb #2 has a lower number of downtime events per year, on balance Kinsta #1 ranks higher due to a significant difference in downtime duration, which is almost half the time as LiquidWeb #2 as seen below:
| WordPress Host | Hosting-Related Downtime Duration per year (365 days) | Downtime events per year (365 days) |
|---|---|---|
| Kinsta #1 | 3:41:19 | 2.3 |
| LiquidWeb #2 | 6:25:41 | 0.6 |
Position #2 – LiquidWeb
LiquidWeb #2 follows Kinsta #1 as a strong second place. It has the lowest number of hosting downtime events in this list, and, any incidents or infrastructure issues are clearly illustrated via its informative status page. LiquidWeb’s ‘why us?’ provides excellent detail and pricing information for potential subscribers.
We can’t personally guarantee this, but we are impressed with LiquidWeb’s infrastructure and what it claims to provide. LiquidWeb only has 3 primary data centers, but an optional Cloudflare CDN is available, as are optional cloud hosting options alongside their dedicated server subscriptions, indicating that LiquidWeb is not limited by 3 data centers. Whilst not specifically a WordPress function, a key aspect to note about why LiquidWeb impressed us was that they are flexible when it comes to operating system and control panel, as users can choose between cPanel, Plesk, or Interworx, as well as a number of different 64-bit operating systems that LiquidWeb supports such as Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu, and Fedora.
LiquidWeb Status Page Features
LiquidWeb’s status page contains real-time data for the operational status of all their systems, as well as a list of past incidents for the past 14 days. Historical data can also be retrieved, and, any incidents recorded by LiquidWeb have an impressive level of detail, including recent updates and any live monitoring taking place. LiquidWeb also provides a link to another status page for their cloud services, which also covers historical data.
Unlike some other WP Hosts, LiquidWeb does not display a 90-day history for all their individual systems aside from load balancer data. However, should you wish to view any incidents for a particular system in recent months, this is still provided through their detailed historical incident page. Overall, LiquidWeb provides an impressive status page and we’re impressed with their downtime result, but what else do we know about their hosting reliability?
LiqudWeb Hosting Reliability
Out of all hosts in this list, LiquidWeb has the third lowest number of downtime events from our collective data. However, our data calculated a staggeringly low number (and the lowest in this list) for the number of downtime events that actually impact hosting. A large majority of LiquidWeb’s recorded downtime is more associated with their support services and management portal, with only one downtime event impacting object storage. This is illustrated in the following table.
| Downtime Events Per Year | Total Number of Downtime Events | Total duration of Downtime | Number of Hosting-Related Downtime Events | Duration of downtime affecting Hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.6 | 17 | 26:01:11 | 1 | 6:25:41 |
Unlike Kinsta, LiquidWeb does not support data for geographical downtime, so it can be expected that the possible downtime could be 11:10:00 for the past 634 days.
In regard to status changes, LiquidWeb claimed 210 status updates for the past 634 days. This is on the lower end compared to other hosts in this list, however:
- Status changes are filled with all the information necessary to explain downtime.
- Additional information is available regarding any updates or changes made to fix downtime.
- Upcoming maintenance and time details are provided for users to be aware of future downtime.
For these reasons, we don’t believe this low number of status updates provides any indication that LiquidWeb is failing to report downtime. More status updates could prove beneficial, but this is no guarantee of reliability, and, the status updates available are highly detailed.
LiquidWeb Overall
Despite a higher number of downtime events than Kinsta#1, and, a longer downtime duration, LiquidWeb#2 still comes in at second place due to lower downtime duration (both average and hosting-impacting) when compared to our third-place host WP Engine#3:
| WordPress Host | Hosting-Related Downtime Duration per year (365 days) | Downtime events per year (365 days) |
|---|---|---|
| Kinsta #1 | 3:41:19 | 2.3 |
| LiquidWeb #2 | 6:25:41 | 0.6 |
| WP Engine #3 | 14:06:18 | 4.1 |
In addition to this, the fact that only one incident in the past 365 days impacted users’ hosting capability is impressive, and, implies to us that hosting-impacting downtime is uncommon with LiquidWeb#2.
Position #3 – WP Engine
The first thing to say about WP Engine #3 is that it does share some similarities to Kinsta #1, with attributes such as a personal dashboard, Google Cloud hosting and an SLA-backed 99.9%+ uptime guarantee. WP Engine #3 has an impressively low number of downtime events per year, as well as a low downtime duration compared to other hosts in this list, so we’re impressed with them overall.
When considering their infrastructure, WP Engine #3 definitely takes a more modern approach by utilizing Google Cloud hosting across 20+ global data centers, as well as offering a personalized editing panel (similar to MyKinsta from Kinsta #1) which is tailored to WordPress better than the likes of cPanel or Plesk. WP Engine #3 also includes a free CDN with all plans, as well as free SSL for additional site security. Other features such as daily security scans, free site migration, and flexibility regarding the PHP version (including the most up-to-date version), all justify WP Engine #3’s price in our opinion, despite some reviews claiming it is costly.
WP Engine Status Page Features
WP Engine’s status page has everything needed for potential subscribers to gain an insight into their downtime dynamics, as well as how WP Engine #3 responds. According to our data, hosting-impacting downtime events are only a fraction of the overall downtime events, but all the downtime information provided on their status page is clear and detailed. Any upcoming maintenance is addressed with times and dates too.
Aside from generic status page features such as color coding and historical information regarding downtime, WP Engine #3 provides a helpful toggle button to display either all systems or those only affected by downtime, making it much easier for users to search for and identify downtime events.
A possible point of improvement we noticed would be an option to select the week you wish to see downtime information for, as currently there are only next week/previous week buttons, meaning you have to click all the way back to the point in time you wish to see. This is not a major issue, however, as a generic calendar view is also available.
With an impressive infrastructure and reliable status page, just how reliable is WP Engine #3 when it comes to hosting?
WP Engine Hosting Reliability
WP Engine #3 has a relatively high downtime duration compared to other hosts in this list. However, as far as hosting-related downtime is concerned, WP Engine #3 is the third lowest in our list. This is no surprise since only a fraction of WP Engine’s downtime events are hosting-related downtime, so we feel reassured that despite the high overall downtime duration, WP Engine #3 is still a reliable WordPress host. This is illustrated in the following table.
| Downtime Events Per Year | Total Number of Downtime Events | Total duration of Downtime | Number of Hosting-Related Downtime Events | Duration of downtime affecting Hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | 43 | 92:05:13 | 7 | 14:06:18 |
According to the data we collected for the geographical downtime dynamics of WP Engine#3, it seems that there is more of a downtime impact on hosting for European users. Compared to Asia and North America, there is a significant difference in downtime duration for their European servers, as the following times’ show:
- Asia/Pacific recorded 2 downtime events with a total duration of 1:19:48
- North America recorded 3 downtime events with a total duration of 2:40:10
- Europe recorded 2 downtime events with a total duration of 20:10:08
This significant time difference for European downtime could be isolated to these 2 incidents but cannot be known for certain, so it has to be assumed that future European downtime would last a similar duration.
WP Engine Long Outages
Aside from the European outages, there are two key downtime events that lasted just short of 20 hours which we would classify as significant, despite not being hosting-related.
- Smart Plugin Manager – 18:14:26
- Migration Plugin – 17:58:58
WP Engine Status Changes
WP Engine recorded 468 status changes in the past 625 days, which is a reasonable number, but, still not up to the level of hosts such as Kinsta #1 or Hostinger #6. That said, WP Engine #3 does provide detailed information for any downtime incidents, including:
- What the issue is and what has been done to solve it (+date/time).
- Any maintenance or investigations taking place.
- Current status of the incident.
WP Engine Overall
WP Engine may have a high number of total downtime events and total downtime duration compared to others in this list, but by having a low number of hosting-related downtime, as well as the third lowest duration for this type of downtime in our list, we feel assured that WP Engine #3 is reliable. By having a reliable and content-filled status page, as well as valuable geographical information regarding downtime, we believe WP Engine #3 deserves its third-place spot.
Position #4 – Flywheel
Flywheel is another great WordPress host that’s similar in style to Kinsta #1 and WPEngine #3, especially if you’re looking for a lower-budget alternative. Whilst Flywheel does have the third highest number of hosting-related downtime events in our list, it still ranks well in terms of downtime duration, leaving us happy with its reliability and therefore fourth place.
In regard to infrastructure, Flywheel really does learn from its competitors. Flywheel migrated to Google Cloud hosting (Google Kubernetes Engine) in early 2021, with 5 global data centers for users to choose from when hosting. Flywheel also utilizes a WordPress-specific control panel, which is definitely proving to be more effective for WordPress hosts than the likes of cPanel and Plesk. Flywheel also provides CDN, migration services, PHP version 8.1, and an SSL certificate as part of all their subscriptions, so subscribers are not missing out. We’re a fan of what Flywheel has to offer.
Flywheel Status Page Features
Flywheel provides thorough detail about any downtime events or maintenance being carried out, including details about the issue causing downtime, who is affected, and what is being done to address the situation. Regular updates are provided, as is any information regarding investigations or further problems. The same applies to maintenance – status updates are provided for scheduled maintenance with dates and times of when maintenance is to occur, as well as its progress and if it is completed, due to be completed, or delayed.
Whilst we have nothing negative to say about Flywheel’s status page as information regarding downtime is provided accurately and in detail, we do see some room for improvement. Firstly, many other hosts in this list provide historical data for both uptime and downtime, something which Flywheel doesn’t have. There is no date or time selection toggle to view uptime for a specific week, something that some users find useful. Flywheel definitely appears to be reliable, but what does our data show?
Flywheel Hosting Reliability
At a first glance of our data, Flywheel might not seem as reliable as its competitors in our list, but this isn’t true. Whilst Flywheel does have a higher number of downtime events relative to other hosts in this list, as well as a high proportion of those events being hosting-related downtime, their downtime duration is pretty impressive given their downtime number. See for yourself below:
| Downtime Events Per Year | Total Number of Downtime Events | Total duration of Downtime | Number of Hosting-Related Downtime Events | Duration of downtime affecting Hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9.9 | 30 | 83:21:44 | 17 | 31:34:52 |
Considering there were 17 hosting-related downtime events, the total duration for this type of downtime is still low, as Flywheel has the fourth lowest duration on our list. Compared to Cloudways #5, Flywheel #4 has significantly more downtime events, yet the duration in which this downtime lasted is lower. Take a look:
| WordPress Host | Hosting-Related Downtime Duration (365 days) | Downtime events per year (365 days) |
|---|---|---|
| Flywheel #4 | 31:34:52 | 9.9 |
| Cloudways #5 | 45:10:07 | 2.9 |
When looking closer at the data, there seem to be 3 key downtime events that significantly contribute to the downtime duration:
- Flywheel Cloud Displaying Cached Feature Settings – 11:50:01
- Intermittent Connectivity Issues (US Region) – 15:10:02
- Connectivity issues for a Subset of Flywheel Cloud Platform sites (EU Region) – 21:30:03
In total, that is 48:30:06, which is over half of the total duration of downtime recorded overall for Flywheel. Two of these three events are location-based connectivity issues, and, whilst Flywheel does not provide geographical data regarding downtime, we have calculated:
- That North America Downtime duration for the last 626 days was 34 hours.
- That Europe Downtime for the last 626 days was (minimum) 26 hours.
Furthermore, from our data, we established that 9 out of 17 hosting-related downtime events were attributed to connectivity issues. This is not to say Flywheel is unreliable when it comes to consistent connectivity, but it does mean connectivity is a driving factor in Flywheel’s downtime, more so than infrastructure robustness or hosting limitations.
Flywheel Status Updates
Flywheel communicated 60 status updates in the last 626 days. This is a low number compared to other hosts in this list, but that does not mean Flywheel are not transparent in their status updates. Every status update, whether it be downtime or maintenance, contains the necessary information to address the update as well as what impact it has on users. The reason for this low number could be:
- No historical uptime or calendar view to update
- No live statuses for individual systems or services – instead only one generic status displaying whether the site is operational/not operational overall.
Flywheel Overall
There are two things to conclude with Flywheel:
- Their high number of downtimes does not mean they are unreliable, as many of these downtime events are associated with connectivity and not the quality of Flywheel itself.
- Their downtime duration is efficient, as their high overall duration for downtime can be attributed to 3 key downtime events making up half the total downtime duration.
Overall, we’re happy with Flywheel, believing it to be a reliable host despite its downtime frequency.
Position #5 – Cloudways
The first thing to understand about Cloudways is that it is not a typical WordPress host, and instead a platform that will allow you to host web applications via a number of hosting methods (more here). However, a number of different review sites for Cloudways all seem to have one thing in common – it’s one of the few methods of WordPress hosting that can balance being a reliable host with affordable prices. We’re a big fan, especially since it has a relatively low number of hosting-related downtime events compared to other hosts in this list. It has reliable and clear status updates, as well as a robust status page, and, any downtime events appear to be communicated transparently.
Cloudways contains a lot of features in their subscription plans which many other hosts in this list do, but their prices are definitely a bit more affordable. Even the most basic plans contain the following:
- Migration, backups and team management.
- Security includes SSL, SSH access, SFTP access, and an extended firewall.
- PHP version 8 (with plans for PHP 8.2 upgrade).
- As of recently, Cloudfare CDN.
- Custom control panel as opposed to cPanel or Plesk
This is already a lot considering their prices, but one aspect we’re even more impressed with Cloudways for is the choice you get between 5 different cloud hosts. Cloudways provides a variety of plans for Linode, Vultr, AWS, Google Cloud hosting (GKE), and DigitalOcean. This variety is beneficial for potential subscribers, as it gives them a choice to pick the cloud hosts that best suits them and their needs.
Cloudways Status Page Features
The first thing we noticed is that Cloudways #5 has a similar status page to LiquidWeb #2, with features such as:
- Past 2 weeks of data for uptime and incidents.
- Option to view historical data.
- All systems and their operational status at the top of the page.
This similarity is likely due to similar software because similar to LiquidWeb, Cloudways’ status page has all the relevant information needed for uptime and downtime data. Historical data can be viewed with information regarding incidents, maintenance, or investigations, all with detailed descriptions. Since the live status of the site overall and all its systems are present, you can rely on their status page to inform you of any downtime or incidents that day.
We have no complaints regarding Cloudways’ status page, though we would say they could improve it by providing updates for any scheduled maintenance. We cannot see any sign of this, but we would argue it’s important for users to be aware of any maintenance or investigations due to happen as it could affect their hosting capability. That said, there is an option to subscribe for updates, so we would expect this keeps subscribers in the loop.
Cloudways have all the utilities to make a reliable host, but what does the data say?
Cloudways Hosting Reliability
The number of downtime events recorded for Cloudways is very low compared to other hosts in this list, and, only a third of its downtime events were actually hosting-related. Such a low number is impressive, and, it’s only the downtime duration that puts Cloudways in our fifth spot.
| Downtime Events Per Year | Total Number of Downtime Events | Total duration of Downtime | Number of Hosting-Related Downtime Events | Duration of downtime affecting Hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.9 | 15 | 91:31:32 | 5 | 45:10:07 |
There is no geographical data available for Cloudways, and, so based on our calculations, we must assume that the possible downtime could be up to 78:05:00 for the past 631 days. There is, however, a key downtime event that occupies a significant proportion of downtime duration recorded for Cloudways:
| System affected | Downtime duration | % Of total duration of downtime |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudways Cloud Platform Console | 64:40:00 | 70.65 |
When you consider the low number of downtime events, Cloudways already seems like a potentially reliable host. However, when you consider that 1 event of 15 is responsible for over 70% of the total downtime duration for the past 631 days, from one perspective it implies that the other downtime events, both hosting-related and not, are resolved efficiently and do not occur often or for long.
On the other hand, you might think such a long single outage could imply unreliability on Cloudways’ part. Looking closer into the outage on Cloudways’ status page, Cloudways claims it was a CDN activation issue due to a problem with a Web Application Firewall (WAF) on behalf of StackPath, their provider. Therefore, this issue was not a fault of Cloudways itself but its WAF provider, so this event alone cannot imply that Cloudways is unreliable.
Cloudways Status Updates
Cloudways communicated 510 status changes in the past 631 days, an impressive number in our opinion. Taking into account that Cloudways’ status updates contain a strong level of detail, as well as their low number of downtime events, we feel that this number of status changes is reflective of Cloudways’ reliability, and, also implies they are transparent with their operational status.
Cloudways Overall
Whilst Cloudways is a bit different from other hosts in this list in that they are not a direct WordPress provider, we’re still impressed with them overall. They have a reliable status page and appear transparent in their status changes. They have an impressively low number of downtime events, only 5 of which are hosting-related downtime events. As for their downtime duration results, it is higher than others in this list, but it can be largely associated with the fact just over 70% of their total downtime was due to one event – and it wasn’t even the fault of Cloudways.
Position #6 – Hostinger
Despite being on the lower end of our list, Hostinger is one of the more notorious hosts out there, and, it seems to appear in a number of reviews and “Top 5 WordPress Host” articles. Data could only be collected for the past 182 days, and, when calculated to 365 days (pro rata), Hostinger does appear to have the highest number of downtime events. That said, its downtime duration really isn’t that bad, especially when taking into account why its duration is higher than others. For us, despite its downtime number, we’re just as impressed with Hostinger as a WordPress host as we are with others above it in this list.
What Hostinger has to offer is valuable but also affordable, and, is unique in that they offer a variety of plans based on four main hosting types including shared hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting, and WordPress hosting. Hostinger offers four WordPress hosting plans:
- Single WordPress Plan at $1.99 per month.
- Starter WordPress at $2.49 per month.
- Business WordPress at $3.99 per month.
- WordPress Pro at $11.59 per month.
All plans are tailored for different uses, so there is some impressive flexibility in what to choose instead of just having one or two generic WordPress plans. All plans include:
- Free SSL, Migration, and 99.9% uptime guarantee (SLA-Backed)
- Cloudflare integration for firewall protection and CDN.
- Custom hPanel – a modernized, Hostinger-only control panel instead of generic cPanel
- PHP 5.2-8.1 Supported.
That said, Business WordPress and WordPress Pro also include free daily backups, whereas other plans only include weekly backups. Furthermore, they both offer a free domain and at least 200GB SSD storage, which can make all the difference. A WordPress staging tool is also offered in these two plans, and, whilst not a necessity, can be a useful addition to WordPress hosting.
Hostinger Status Page Features
Hostinger’s status page is very similar in design to Kinsta, and, just like Kinsta, we are happy with it too. The past two weeks of incident history is displayed, as is the operational status of all the different systems and servers, as well as a 90-day history for both cloud and shared hosting. Scheduled maintenance is also displayed and with a good level of detail. Any incidents contain adequate information regarding the reason for downtime, investigation/maintenance in progress, and whether the situation is resolved. We have no complaints, and, believe that Hostinger’s status page is one of the most reliable and informative we have come across. We’re impressed with their status page and their plans seem affordable, but how reliable are Hostinger in terms of downtime?
Hosting Reliability
Due to their high variety of plans available, Hostinger occupies 300+ servers (according to their status page) and so some downtime can be expected. Therefore, it is no surprise that Hostinger has the highest number of downtime events on our list. Furthermore, when calculated to 365 days, Hostinger has the second longest downtime duration in our list. You can see for yourself below:
| Downtime Events Per Year | Total Number of Downtime Events | Total duration of Downtime | Number of Hosting-Related Downtime Events | Duration of downtime affecting Hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 36.0 | 22 | 32:17:57 | 18 | 57:40:43 |
When taking a closer look at the data, it appears that 16 of 18 downtime events that could affect hosting were attributed to the cloud and shared hosting. Of these 16 events, 6 key servers were responsible for a high duration:
| Server Type | Server Name | Total Downtime |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Hosting | fr-ovh1-web769.main-hosting.eu nl-srv-web296.main-hosting.eu us-imm-web268.main-hosting.eu | 0:27:03 1:52:00 0:24:53 |
| Shared Hosting | us-imm-web254.main-hosting.eu us-imm-web398.main-hosting.eu us-phx-web775.main-hosting.eu | 22:12:37 0:09:48 0:59:55 |
As you can see, 22:12:37 of the total downtime recorded is due to one particular server, and, are responsible for two key events occurring between 08/06/2022 and 10/06/2022 in which the server experienced degradation. The downtime for this server is responsible for 68.76% of the total downtime duration we recorded in the past 182 days, so we do not feel this one event reflects the reliability of Hostinger overall. In fact, other downtime events appeared to be resolved quickly based on our times, which actually implies Hostinger approaches downtime efficiently and have it resolved as quickly as possible. Also, none of these servers were in the US, so it can be assumed that if you are in the US, you had 0 minutes of downtime.
Hostinger Status Updates
To further build their reliability, Hostinger communicated the highest number of status updates at 1316 in the past 182 days. Since their downtime events were at a higher number we would expect more status updates, and, given the quality of the updates and Hostinger’s status page, we do feel that this aspect really contributes to their reliability. They also appear to have a lot of maintenance history, which is another factor contributing to this high number.
Hostinger Overall
Hostinger has a high number of downtimes and duration when calculated to 365 days, but based on our collected data, the key reason for this duration was one key server being responsible for just under 70% of total downtime. Furthermore, any downtime events were communicated clearly and compared to other hosts in this list, were resolved quickly. The reason for their high downtime number was more likely to do with the vast number of servers, not their reliability, as they still have a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Overall, we were really pleased with Hostinger.
Position #7 – Dreamhost
Dreamhost is the final host in our list, but that’s not to say it isn’t a reliable or bad host compared to others. Whilst Dreamhost has the highest number of downtime events in our list, as well as the longest downtime duration, only a proportion of their overall downtime events are considered critical, or hosting-related.
Before we jump into the data, we’re just as impressed when it comes to what’s on offer from Dreamhost as well as its infrastructure. There are 3 WordPress plan types available:
- WordPress Basic
- DreamPress
- VPS WordPress
All plan types include their own variety of plans, with the cheapest being $4.95pm and the most expensive being £120pm. All plan types are suitable for different users depending on their requirements, which are nicely listed in the plan details. All plans include:
- Free SSL, migration, domain and daily backups
- An unlimited number of visits per month and unlimited bandwidth
- Free Cloudflare CDN
- Custom control panel instead of cPanel or other generic control panels
These are features that, whilst common in WordPress plans, indicate good value for money given the affordable subscription prices. In addition to this, a free WordPress website builder is provided with plans, which have been a big hit with users based on reviews. One potential downside is that Dreamhost only supports PHP version 7, but since is the more commonly used version, this isn’t a big disappointment unless up-to-date PHP is what you require.
Dreamhost Status Page Features
Dreamhost has a clear status page that tells you what you need to know about the operational status of the system transparently. Any upcoming maintenance is highlighted with details regarding time and date, as well as all the details necessary to work around this maintenance. In addition to this, they communicated an impressive number of status changes, with 764 in the past 634 days.
A history of downtime and incidents are provided; however, they are only the most recent events. Whilst the detail about the incidents is clear and transparent, only the past 14 days are present, so we cannot view a majority of past downtime incidents recorded. This does not mean Dreamhost are not transparent with their data, as details about downtime events are thorough and clear, but a history of downtime would be beneficial for them.
Overall were happy with Dreamhost’s status page since they communicate any incidents in good detail and transparency, but what does their data say about their reliability as a WordPress host?
Dreamhost Hosting Reliability
The most important thing to consider with Dreamhost is that they do have the highest number of downtime events in our list, but not when calculated pro rata. With that in mind, only a proportion of those events are hosting-related downtime, and, the other events are not critical.
Of these downtime events, Dreamhost does have the longest downtime duration:
| Downtime Events Per Year | Total Number of Downtime Events | Total duration of Downtime | Number of Hosting-Related Downtime Events | Duration of downtime affecting Hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25.9 | 125 | 233:22:51 | 45 | 87:05:12 |
When compared to Hostinger, Dreamhost has a lower number of calculated downtime events per year, despite having a lower number of downtime events recorded overall:
| Host | Downtime Events per year | Actual number of hosting-related downtime |
|---|---|---|
| Hostinger | 36 | 18 |
| Dreamhost | 25.9 | 45 |
This doesn’t prove Dreamhost is reliable, but it does indicate that despite the significant number of downtime events recorded overall, this does not necessarily mean that a significant number will impact hosting. When taking a closer look at the downtime events that do impact hosting, it became clear that there were two key contributors:
- Shared hosting
- VPS
Out of the total downtime recorded over 634 days, the duration of the downtime associated with these two events have a significant impact:
| Downtime | Duration of downtime | % Of total downtime over 634 days |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Hosting | 112:10:08 | 74.14 |
| VPS | 19:48:48 | 13.1 |
When looking further into the downtime events associated with these contributors, there was one key event that drove downtime duration up:
- 2022-07-28/20:00:52 – Shared server connectivity downtime lasting 93:40:18.
This is a significant event, as this one event alone (out of 45) is responsible for approximately 62% of hosting-related downtime duration. Therefore, despite the high downtime duration, there is no reason to believe that Dreamhost is unreliable, as there was one driving connectivity event that caused a significant proportion of recorded downtime. Other downtime events appear to have been dealt with efficiently, which implies Dreamhost support is proactive in fixing downtime.
There is no geographical data available for Dreamhost, so we must assume the possible downtime is between 0 – 112:10:08.
Dreamhost Overall
Dreamhost may have the highest downtime duration and a high number of downtime events, but when looking closely at the data, there are reasons for this. Overall, we’re impressed and believe it is a reliable host, and, especially ideal for beginners in WordPress hosting.
Why did we exclude GoDaddy, HostPress, and AnchorHost?
You might have noticed we did have StatusGator data for these three WordPress hosts, yet we didn’t rank them in our article. Here’s why:
GoDaddy
Despite being one of the more popular choices for WordPress hosting, we felt that due to a low number of status changes in the time period we observed, we simply could not establish how transparent GoDaddy was in their status changes. A total of 111 status changes were observed in the past 624 days, which is concerningly low.
Another concern we had is that GoDaddy’s status page has a daily history for the past 7 days but no further than that, and unlike other hosts, there is no historical uptime available. By having no historical uptime, we cannot tell whether the downtime events recorded were critical or not, how they were communicated, or what trends/concerns we had for individual events. We know for a fact based on multiple real user complaints that some downtime events were critical, for example, we saw multiple tweets claiming GoDaddy’s servers were down on May 26, 2021, with some users even saying their status page was down. The same applies to April 7, 2021, where we found a Reddit thread stating servers were down.
This lack of information indicates a lack of transparency from GoDaddy, so we felt we could not include them in our ranking. However, it’s important to note that as of Sep 19, 2022, GoDaddy launched a new status page on statuspage.io which is an impressive upgrade from our point of view, with more valuable information regarding downtime and status changes than we observed previously. We see this as a huge step toward transparency.
AnchorHost
Our main concern with AnchorHost was such a low number of status changes, with only 11 status updates for the last 485 days. Such a low number of outages does not seem reliable, and we cannot establish if this was due to low downtime frequency or if they have just not been communicated properly, but on our view, the latter is more likely.
Our reason for this is that AnchorHost recorded some downtime events for certain issues but not for others, despite us knowing they occurred. For example, we see that Anchor Host communicated a “Cloudflare outage affecting some customers on the east coast” on 2021-06-02 at 18:47:27. This coincides with our own research, but there were more Cloudflare outages that occurred in the past that have not been recorded, e.g. June 21, 2022, in which Cloudflare outages affected 19 data of their data centers. This lack of knowledge surrounding AnchorHosts status changes means we could not include it in our ranking.
HostPress
Similar to AnchorHost, HostPress communicated a low number of status updates, with only 9 for the past 198 days. Such a low number indicates unreliability, and we cannot establish if these updates were downtime events or not. Furthermore, like GoDaddy, we cannot see any historical data for HostPress on their status page. Whilst this is not an issue for our methodology as StatusGator can produce this for us, no historical data to explain their downtime events to potential subscribers does indicate they are not wholly transparent. When considering such a low frequency of recorded downtimes too, we feel there is an indication of unreliability.
Overall, our reasons do not mean these sites are unreliable, and that’s important to note. It just meant that for this article and our ranking, we could not include these hosts as it would not be a fair comparison.
Our Methodology
Our first decision was to limit our list to the best WordPress hosts rather than Web hosts in general. There were a few reasons for this, the main one being that we do have multiple projects on the go that would utilize WordPress, so knowing what our best hosting option would be is beneficial.
However, the other reason is that it can be difficult to compare hosts effectively, for example comparing Kinsta with AWS or LiquidWeb with IBM Cloud. By keeping our list WordPress-specific and ruling out all other hosts available, we can provide a much more reliable comparison of hosting features and utility.
How did we get our technical data?
The primary tool used to gain our data was our own product StatusGator, as historically StatusGator has been a valuable tool to analyze historical outages and receive instant status notifications, either as messages or updates. StatusGator cleans, enriches, and stores data, and, is an efficient means to evaluate transparency in status pages and stay on top of outages and downtime.
StatusGator has even been used by many notorious companies (including Amazon,…) so that such companies can stay ahead of their downtime and decrease MTTR and MTTF, so we never hesitate to utilize it when possible. Due to its capacity for monitoring 2000+ cloud services and their components, as well as having both historical and real-time data, StatusGator has proved to be a valuable tool.
How did we decide which hosts to rank?
Since there are many WordPress hosts available, you might be wondering how we narrowed down a list before we even set out to explore their reliability. To narrow down our list, there are a few steps we took.
Firstly, we carried out internet research and examined several reviews and articles related to WordPress hosting. The terms we most commonly searched included ‘WP hosting provider’, “WP hosting provider comparison”, “best WP hosting provider 2022”, etc. By searching these terms, we could establish a list based on the most commonly discussed WordPress hosts as well as other, less-common hosts.
Once we had our list of potential WordPress hosts, we narrowed our search further. We took into account two more factors:
- Which hosts did StatusGator have data for
- Which hosts had a valid status page
We excluded hosts with no valid status page or StatusGator data, which left us with a more exclusive list to analyze.
What other considerations did we take into account for analysis?
There were three main considerations taken into account:
- Status page richness – for each host, there was a different level of data available on their status page. Some hosts, like Hostinger, would provide a rich level of detail (such as uptime, maintenance details, historical data, etc) whereas other hosts, for example, GoDaddy (up until recently, see more below), would provide less valuable information. Some hosts would provide extra information such as uptime for support and additional services, whereas some hosts would only provide downtime information and nothing more. To solve this and ensure a fair comparison, we carried out the manual analysis of each status page.
- Data Period – We did not have the same data period for each host, as some hosts were added to Statusgator later than others. To ensure our comparison was fair, we took data for each host over a suitable time period but adjusted our calculations pro rata to 365 days for every host.
- Difference in communication transparency – Due to such a significant variation in status changes for our hosts, we cannot guarantee that each host communicates status updates transparently. For example, HostPress only had 9 status updates in the last 198 days, yet Hostinger had 1316 in the past 182 days. This difference is significant, and so we had to mark some hosts as having a low number of status updates and approach status page analysis manually.
By taking these factors into account, we could ensure that our data comparison between hosts was fair and accurate.
How did we treat different component outages?
There are a number of elements of a WordPress host that could experience downtime, but this doesn’t mean all of them are significant or impact hosting. A good status page will provide downtime information for all incidents, not just hosting-related downtime, so it’s important for us to be able to separate the two.
To do this, we divided certain downtime events into critical and none critical as seen below:
| Critical (Hosting-Related Downtime) | Not critical (does not affect hosting) |
| Shared hosting | Emails |
| VPS | Help centers and support live chats |
| Datacenters | All additional services such as Git, etc. |
| Dedicated Servers | Control panel services (cPanel, etc.) |
| DNS | Billing and subscription services |
From this, we could establish total downtime and hosting-related downtime effectively.
Why does reliability matter?
Given the costs that are attributed to WordPress hosting reliability (Estimates range between $5600-9000 per minute), as well as how many businesses rely on a host to efficiently host their website, it’s key that your WordPress host is reliable. Hosting-related downtime can result in lost revenue and engagement (Reports show companies lose 545 hours of staff productivity per year due to IT outages), so uptime efficiency is important.
However, that’s not the only reason why reliability matters. Aspects other than downtime, such as communication and how efficiently downtime events are resolved, are factors that all matter in the event of downtime incidents. By having transparent status updates and efficient resolution of downtime, it reassures you that any future downtime is likely to be approached with care and that any future downtime is more likely to be less of an issue to your hosting capability.
Our Conclusion
We set out to analyze a unique set of data, official status data obtained through StatusGator. Our goal was to accurately and fairly compare commonly used WordPress hosts. By using this data, as well as manually observing status page quality and status update frequency, we felt we could establish a strong ranking that provides you with a robust insight into the reliability of available WordPress hosts.
Overall, our data says that Kinsta is the most reliable option because they have the fewest downtime events and the shortest overall downtime duration. But this does not mean that other hosts were unreliable or not a good choice when compared to Kinsta. It’s important to note that publishing an issue to a status page does not mean that all customers are affected by the outage. All of the providers we analyzed are popular, reliable choices for WordPress hosting.
Monitor the Status of Your Cloud Providers with StatusGator
With StatusGator, you can communicate the status of your website with clients and partners for one of the lowest costs on the market. Also, you can monitor the status of your hosting provider, your cloud provider, your email integration, your helpdesk software, and more. This way, you can stay on top of outages that affect your customers and keep your status page updated. You can post an outage to let your audience know you are working on the issue. Aggregating the status pages of all your dependencies is what StatusGator does.
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