About

What this is

The WordPress hosting industry runs on an enormous amount of shared infrastructure — panels, billing systems, security layers, email, CDNs — but there has never been a single place where that landscape is visible. wphosts.com maps it: 47 standardized layers across 6 tiers, 261 products, the hosts that run them, and the investors behind the vendors.

How the data works

Three kinds of data, three different rules:

• Self-reported (hosts): hosts claim their profile with a work email, domain-verified, and declare the tooling they run layer by layer, choosing public, private, or hidden for each. Market Share is computed from these declarations, one count per host per layer. No surveys, no scraping.
• Claimed (infra vendors): vendors claim their company the same way, and one claim covers the entire product portfolio. It comes with live layer rankings, every host association tracked as it changes, and a pipeline showing which hosts run them and which do not.
• Editorial & locked: ownership and backer information — who owns whom, which private-equity and investment firms hold stakes where — is maintained by us from public investor records, cited, and cannot be edited by the companies it describes.

How disclosure works

Declaring is not all or nothing. Every layer a host declares is in one of three states:

• Public: shown on your profile and counted in market share, attributed to you.
• Private: counted toward aggregate market share, never shown against your name.
• Hidden: not recorded at all.

Security-sensitive layers can stay private. A profile is valuable with only part of the stack public, and no host has to expose their panel, WAF, or isolation layer to take part. Private declarations still sharpen the market-share picture the whole industry reads, so showing up is influence over how your layers get defined and counted, not data handed to a competitor.

Methodology

This section is the complete answer to "where do these numbers come from." If something here doesn't match what you see on the site, that is a bug — tell us.

What counts as a declaration. A declaration is one host stating that it runs one product at one layer of the taxonomy, made from a claimed, domain-verified profile. Declaring is layer by layer: a host that fills twelve layers has made twelve declarations. Free-text "custom" entries and in-house builds are recorded on the profile but never counted as any vendor's adoption.

How market share is calculated. For each layer, market share is the number of published hosts declaring a product at that layer, divided by the number of published hosts with any declaration at that layer. It is a share of reporting hosts, not of the whole market, and every layer's page says how many hosts that denominator is. A host declaring two products at one layer counts once for each product; one host is never double-counted for the same product.

How the numbers were initially populated. Before any host claimed a profile, the board was seeded with editorial reference data: stack associations compiled from public sources — vendor partner pages, official announcements, conference materials, and published case studies — plus AI-assisted research, each labeled editorial in the data. Editorial rows exist so the board is useful on day one, and they are second-class by design: the moment a claimed host declares at a layer, its self-reported declaration replaces the editorial rows for that layer entirely. Every surface labels which kind of data it is showing.

The three disclosure states. Every declaration is public, private, or hidden. Public appears on the host's profile and in market share, attributed. Private counts toward the aggregate numbers but is never attributed. Hidden is not recorded at all — the layer simply isn't on the record.

How private declarations are aggregated without attribution. Aggregate totals are computed inside the database by a function that returns only per-product host counts — no host identifiers leave it. Public pages cannot query private rows at all; they receive the anonymous totals and nothing else. That is why a layer can show "14 hosts" while only nine appear by name: five counted privately, and neither this site nor its readers can tell you which five.

How ownership data is sourced and locked. Ownership and investor records — who owns whom, which firms hold stakes where — are compiled by us from public records: regulatory filings, official acquisition announcements, investor pages, and reputable industry reporting, with sources kept alongside the claims. These records are editorial-locked: the claim system deliberately has no write path to them, so no company can edit its own ownership story — including Seahawk. Corrections go through the corrections inbox, are checked against sources, and verified errors get fixed promptly.

The taxonomy

Every layer, product, and company lives in one standardized taxonomy that drives the entire site — the stack reference, vendor directory, host profiles, and market share. One change propagates everywhere, which keeps the comparison consistent. Think a product is missing or misplaced? Tell us.

Ownership and neutrality

wphosts.com is an independent index published by Seahawk Media, a WordPress media company under Seahawk Global that also appears in this index as an infra vendor. Rankings are seeded by publicly sourced partner information, then driven by host declarations, never by placement or payment, and there is no paid tier that moves a vendor up a layer. Ownership and investor data is sourced from public records, cited, and locked from editing by the companies it describes, including Seahawk's own entries.

Perspective & disclosure

This platform is maintained by people active in the WordPress hosting ecosystem, including Seahawk. Some products in the taxonomy — WP Maintain, WP Care, and Seahawk's services — are ours. We mark our perspective rather than hide it: rankings are computed from self-reported data with a published method, ownership claims are sourced, and no one — including us — can pay to rank.