Liquid Web and WP Engine branded the most reliable hosts as WordPress turns 20

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By Abigail Opiah
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WordPress was initially a fork of b2/cafelog

Laptop computer displaying logo of WordPress, a free and open-source content management system (CMS)
(Image credit: Shutterstock/monticello)

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

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

This comes as WordPress, the open-source content management system (CMS), 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 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.” 

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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, Cloudways, Hostinger and DreamHost 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, 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, VPS, data center, dedicated servers and DNS falling into the critical hosting-related downtime category.

The non critical downtime observed include email, help centers and live chat support, cPanel, as well as billing and subscription services. 

Abigail Opiah
Abigail Opiah
B2B Editor - Web hosting & Website builders

Abigail is a B2B Editor that specializes in web hosting and website builder news, features and reviews at TechRadar Pro. She has been a B2B journalist for more than five years covering a wide range of topics in the technology sector from colocation and cloud to data centers and telecommunications. As a B2B web hosting and website builder editor, Abigail also writes how-to guides and deals for the sector, keeping up to date with the latest trends in the hosting industry. Abigail is also extremely keen on commissioning contributed content from experts in the web hosting and website builder field.