Most “market share” numbers for WordPress hosting are either vendor marketing or a single crawler’s guess at who serves what. Hosts deserve better data about their own market, and the people choosing a host deserve a view that connects infrastructure, plans, and vendors rather than a star rating. That is what WP Hosts was built to be: a relational index of WordPress hosts and the vendors behind them. This guide explains what it tracks, how hosts use it, and how to claim your profile.
What the index tracks
WP Hosts models the hosting market as relationships, not a list. Each host profile connects to the infrastructure, software, and partners that make up its stack.
Host entities. Brands, parent companies, and acquisitions. Many hosting brands share an owner; the index records those relationships so market share can be read at the brand level and the group level.
Infrastructure. Data center providers and regions, CDN and edge partners, DNS providers, and whether a host runs its own hardware, rents it, or builds on a public cloud.
Platform stack. Control panel (cPanel, Plesk, custom), web server, PHP versions offered and defaulted, database engine, caching layers, and managed WordPress features such as staging, automatic updates, and malware scanning.
Plans and positioning. Plan tiers, included domains and email, WordPress-specific plans versus generic shared hosting, and the audiences a host targets (SMB, agencies, enterprise, developers).
Vendor relationships. Which payment processors, security vendors, backup providers, and services partners a host works with, and which hosts a vendor serves. This is the relational part: you can start from a vendor and see its host footprint, or from a host and see its suppliers.
Observed footprint. Where data is available, the share of WordPress sites observed on each host’s infrastructure, tracked over time. The index treats this as an estimate with stated methodology, not a headline number.
How hosts use it
Competitive positioning. Seeing which competitors run on the same cloud region, offer the same PHP defaults, or share a CDN partner sharpens the story you tell. “Same infrastructure, better support” is a claim you can only make if you know the infrastructure.
Partner and vendor decisions. Choosing a backup provider or a CDN is easier when you can see which comparable hosts already use it and which have switched away.
Sales enablement. Prospects, especially agencies and enterprises, ask what your stack is. A claimed, accurate profile answers before the call. Agencies moving a portfolio of client sites use the index to shortlist hosts, and hosts that are not in it are not on the list.
Acquisition and market analysis. The ownership graph shows consolidation as it happens. If you are evaluating an acquisition or deciding where to compete, the group-level view is the starting point.
Reputation separated from rankings. WP Hosts is a data index, not a review site. For independent rankings and reviews, Seahawk runs HostList separately, so the facts and the opinions stay in different places.
What claiming a profile gives you
An unclaimed profile is built from public data and may be incomplete or out of date: a PHP default you changed last year, a CDN partner you stopped using, a plan tier that no longer exists. Claiming lets you:
- Verify and correct infrastructure, stack, and plan details.
- Add relationships the crawler cannot see, such as services partners, white-label vendors, and reseller programs.
- Publish your positioning (target audiences, specialties, regions served) so you appear in the right comparisons.
- Keep it current with a change log, so prospects see that the profile is maintained.
- Receive updates when the index records a change to your profile or a competitor’s.
Claimed profiles are marked as verified by the host, which carries weight with the agencies and enterprises who use the index to shortlist.
How to claim
- Find your host on WP Hosts and open the profile.
- Request a claim using an email address on your company domain. Shared mailboxes are fine; personal email providers are not accepted.
- Verify ownership through a DNS record or a file on your primary domain. This step prevents competitors from editing each other’s profiles.
- Review each section of the pre-filled profile and correct what is wrong. Infrastructure and plan sections are the ones most often out of date.
- Add your vendor and partner relationships. Each one creates a link in the index in both directions.
- Assign a maintainer and set a quarterly reminder to review it.
Most claims are reviewed within a few business days. Disputed data (for example, a vendor relationship the vendor denies) is flagged rather than silently resolved either way.
Reading market share responsibly
A few habits that keep the data useful:
- Compare trends, not single snapshots. A one-month movement is noise; a four-quarter trend is information.
- Read brand-level and group-level share together. A brand losing share inside a group that is gaining share is a different story from a brand losing share on its own.
- Note the methodology attached to each observed figure before quoting it externally.
Next step
Claim your profile on WP Hosts so the index reflects your actual infrastructure, plans, and partners. It takes an afternoon, and it is the version of your host that agencies and enterprise buyers will see when they shortlist.