New data has named Kinsta (opens in new tab), Liquid Web (opens in new tab), and WP Engine (opens in new tab) as the most reliable WordPress hosting providers based on a study that analyzed historical data on all downtime events for each service.

StatusGator (opens in new tab), the data monitoring tool found that on average, WordPress hosting (opens in new tab) providers have 11 hours and six minutes of downtime per year.

This comes as WordPress, the open-source content management system (CMS (opens in new tab)), prepares to celebrate its 20th anniversary this year.

20 years of WordPress

WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, as a fork of b2/cafelog.

In a tweet (opens in new tab) posted on January 25, 2023, WordPress co-founder, Mike Little said: “20 years ago today, I commented on Matt's blog & kicked off the project that became WordPress. Now WordPress powers over 43% of most popular domains. It is made by a worldwide community of thousands of contributors & millions of users.”

Matt Mullenweg says he was so lucky that Mike had left that comment, describing that moment in 2003 as “the butterfly effect”.

The official anniversary date for WordPress’ launch is May 27, 2023, and the platform is planning a number of events during the first of the year to celebrate.

In the study looking into WordPress services, StatusGator listed Flywheel (opens in new tab), Cloudways (opens in new tab), Hostinger (opens in new tab) and DreamHost (opens in new tab) in the top seven most reliable WordPress hosts.

Based on the results, Liquid Web has the fewest hosting-related downtimes at 0.6 per year, while Hostinger has the most at 36.0 per year, and some providers, such as GoDaddy (opens in new tab), Anchor Host, and HostPress, were found to not make their downtimes public.

In order to produce the findings, StatusGator divided certain downtime events into critical and non critical sections with shared hosting (opens in new tab), VPS (opens in new tab), data center, dedicated servers (opens in new tab) and DNS (opens in new tab) falling into the critical hosting-related downtime category.

The non critical downtime observed include email, help centers and live chat (opens in new tab) support, cPanel, as well as billing and subscription services.