Hostinger became the latest entrant into the WordPress.org recommended hosting list. Audrey Capital-sponsored contributor Samuel “Otto” Wood added Hostinger to the list on March 28, 2024. The other hosting companies currently on the list are Bluehost, Dreamhost and WordPress.com.
The Controversial WP Recommended Hosting Page
The WordPress Recommended Hosting page, which showcases “some of the best and brightest of the hosting world,” has always been controversial in the community. Flywheel and SiteGround were on the list once but were later removed. The removal of SiteGround last year was met with community backlash and the contributors demanded transparency and objective guidelines for listings.
To help craft a page with better acceptance, members of the Make WordPress Hosting team worked on “Project Bedrock,” which proposes a directory with all hosting providers that meet a set of requirements while Courtney Robertson shared a Hosting Application Rubric. However, nothing much has come out of the projects.
The WordPress hosting page reads: “Listing is completely arbitrary, but includes criteria like: contributions to WordPress.org, size of customer base, ease of WP auto-install and auto-upgrades, avoiding GPL violations, design, tone, historical perception, using the correct logo, capitalizing WordPress correctly, not blaming us if you have a security issue, and up-to-date system software.” But the actual listing process is a mystery.
Interestingly, we couldn’t find anything about Hostinger’s performance on WPHostingBenchmarks.com. However, it has a rating of 4.75 based on 4 reviews on The WP World’s new hosting page. Unlike WordPress.org, both these websites have made their criteria for rating hosting providers publicly available. Curiously, we did not come across any discussion about this inclusion on Twitter or Slack, unlike the SiteGround removal last year.
Update: Review Signal founder Kevin Ohashi is not impressed about this development and said: “The addition of Hostinger to the wordpress.org hosting page is troublesome for multiple reasons. They have a questionable history in terms of behavior which I have documented. The process for being added to the page itself is still publicly undefined. Despite many efforts, my own included, to make the process transparent and open – it remains a black box where seemingly one person arbitrarily makes decisions. For a listing potentially worth a fortune to any company, and leveraging the brand of the wordpress.org ecosystem that seems deeply wrong.”
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