2025 Digital Agency Web Host Report
Executive Summary
Clear leaders and a crowded middle.
Five hosts: AWS, WP Engine, Google, DigitalOcean, and GoDaddy lead our agency rankings across nine core factors associated with how agency teams select web hosts for their clients. They outrank every competitor on both Performance & Reliability and overall Agency Fit.
Security, Site speed, and Uptime all dominate the top factors in how agency teams select hosts. Agency teams won’t compromise here, no matter how attractive the pricing or partner perks appear. The top five do convincingly well here, while everyone else has their strengths split across one or two core factors, with subpar rankings across the rest.
The middle is noisy and volatile. Ten hosts sit below average on the survey’s composite scores. Some offer perfectly good niche value, yet each shows visible gaps when compared against the top five. However, this is a shifting market, and a pricing adjustment, feature release, or support refactor could quickly propel any of these hosts into tier-1 status.
In this report, we break down the data behind each tier and map each host across nine core factors that drive hosting decisions. This will hopefully help shops match project demands to the right provider and make the hosting decision a bit easier.
About This Report
An online survey was designed and fielded in June 2025 to Promethean’s agency audience via email invitations. This audience consisted of Promethean’s global agency audience, plus a specific focus on 12,060 digital agencies, located in the United States, that offered web development as a service. The survey included rating scales, multiple-choice, and open-ended questions to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. The survey was designed to capture both partial and full responses. We received 118 total responses, 43 partial, and 75 full. This presents an expected 9-to-11% margin of error at a 95% confidence level with an expected total population of 12,000 digital agencies offering web development. This was published in June 2025.
The vast majority of our respondents were Director-level or above at their respective agencies.
We had a relatively equal split among agency sizes in our responses (excluding 250+ FTEs). This survey skewed slightly toward larger agencies than what we have observed in the general population. This is typical of our network and consistent with our other studies.
The hosts we focused the survey on included: AWS, Bluehost, DigitalOcean, Flywheel, GoDaddy, Google, Hostgator, Hostinger, IONOS, Liquid Web, Namecheap, SiteGround, Webflow, Wix Studio, WP Engine, and WPMU Dev. These hosts were included in each multiple-choice question along with an “other” option. Inclusion was based on our initial conversations with agency leaders and other market research.
