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, 254 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.

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 agency 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.