I have my very personal list of best WordPress hosting companies and host my WordPress site at Convesio, but of course there are other sources. The review service G2 is one of the more trusted and go-to services in the review space. They release quarterly market reports and the web hosting category is of specific interest to me. With the latest report (December 15, 2020) let’s see where the top five hosting companies across All Segments and Small Business land.

The specific G2 category to review is Best Web Hosting Providers. The are three segments: Small Business, Mid Market, and Enterprise, and of course the rollup of all three, All Segments. By default, the lists are ordered from best to worst using the proprietary G2 Score, “This score is based on reviews gathered from our user community, as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks. A unique algorithm is applied to this data to calculate the Satisfaction and Market Presence scores in real time.” There are also satisfaction and popularity scores. The full set of G2 Scoring Methodologies are published and go into great detail.

Fall 2020 Reports

Going back in time with archive.org (October 4, 2020) we can get the lists for All Segments and Small Business, I’m going to just go with the top 5 in each segment. Unfortunately we can’t grab the historical rankings for Satisfaction and Popularity from archive.org.

All Segments

Small Business

Winter 2021 Reports

This is where the fun begins since the real-time date is much more expanded, we can search, sort, compare, and get fantastic details on very specific aspects of hosting. Let’s repeat the Fall 2020 tables with the updated data.

All Segments

Hostwinds moved up four positions from nine to five in G2 Score. We don’t have the historical Satisfaction ranking but very interestingly you have Convesio and openElement in the top five where they don’t appear in the G2 Score top five. Convesio doesn’t crack the G2 Score top 30 just three months ago and openElement is back at 21, again from the Fall 2020 Report. In this latest report, Winter 2021, Convesio is ranked at 24 in G2 Score and openElement is at 20. G2 allows you to do some great comparisons, you can only do four at a time but on the plus side the comparison pages generate shareable links. A comparison of the top four in All Segments based on G2 Score yields a ton of interesting data starting down the page with Ratings and then continuing with Features, Reviewers’ Company Size, and Reviewers’ Industry. Here are comparisons for Satisfaction and Popularity.

Small Business

The Grid and Details

Now that you understand how to go through the main pages, feel free to dive into Mid Market and Enterprise lists, let’s take a look at The Grid. This is dependent upon the specific view you are in, G2 or Satisfaction or Popularity, as well as All Segments or Small Business or Mid Market or Enterprise. The chart is pretty self explanatory, a quadrant based on Satisfaction and Market Presence.

You can select any host from the grid and dive into their specific details, you can do this from anywhere but while we’re viewing the grid let’s use it. You get a lot of standard information and I like the simple User Rating charts.

Why Web Hosting Reviews Matter?

We’ve barely scratched the surface on all the details available, comparisons, and reports. I do have to say that G2 certainly correlates well with my views on Convesio and Pantheon. Make sure to make G2 data as valuable as possible by submitting your experiences for other people. It’s all too easy to dump on a host so try and add value with the good as well.

And just for easy of use, all the hosting companies listed in this post (in alphabetical order):

• Bluehost
• Convesio
• GoDaddy
• Hostwinds
• Kinsta
• LiquidWeb
• Lunarpages (now HostPapa)
• openElement
• Pantheon
• SiteGround
• WP Engine