Uptime Rankings of WP Hosts - After 3 Years of Live Testing

After 3 Years of testing, let’s find out which hosts are proving to be the most reliable in the Uptime Rankings.

Weekly Uptime Testing Method

Compare 8 WordPress Hosts
Use 8 Live Sites, each with a Different Host but with Identical Content (you can check them out here)
Use Pingdom Uptime Test

Testing Locations: North America, Latin America, Europe & Asia Pacific
Frequency of Weekly Testing: Every Minute across the Last 7 Days
Total Number of Tests = 1 x60 x24 x7 x8 x140 = 11,289,600 (xMinutes xHours xDays xSites xWeeks)
Uptime testing is confirming that the website is actually accessible to visitors
An example of why an outage (or downtime) can occur is scheduled maintenance of the server the website is hosted on

WordPress Hosts

Identical Live Sites

Total Tests

Uptime Rankings – Apr 2016 to DEC 2018

Congratulations to Lightning Base for being the most reliable host!! Across almost 2 years since Lightning Base was added, they have recorded only 65 minutes of downtime, which is very impressive indeed. To make sure all hosts are treated equally (regardless of how long they have been included in our tests), an annualized downtime is used. And using this measure, Lightning Base is out in front of both SiteGround & GoDaddy.

At the other end of the scale is A2 Hosting, as they experienced a disastrous Q4 2016 performance. Things did not improve in early 2017, and as a result, they were replaced by Namecheap on 28th Jan 2017.

Going forward, I am keen to see whether Lightning Base can maintain such impressive uptime results. And with new hosts jumping into the mix in 2019, I cant wait to see which hosts are most reliable!!