What Does Your Host Say About You?

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Forget horoscopes, mood rings, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator—they’ve got nothing on your hosting provider. That’s right, the host you choose for your website can say a lot about you and what’s important to you.

We’re kicking off this series of infographics with HostGator, one of the largest and most popular hosting providers. We took a random sampling of 300 sites hosted on HostGator, and analyzed some key aspects of those sites in order to determine how someone who chooses HostGator manages their site, and what services they use to do it. That, in turn, tells us what those site owners feel is important in running their websites.

For example, HostGator users are savvy about email marketing, being seven times more likely to use AWeber than Constant Contact to communicate with their sites’ visitors. Continuing the communication trend, HostGator is the 10th top hosting provider for sites using RSS feeds, and 26% of those sampled HostGator users have RSS feeds set up. This is also a good indicator that the RSS feed is not dead.

When it comes to actually managing their sites, a whopping 81% of HostGator users have built their sites using the WordPress content management system (CMS). WordPress is one of the most widely used CMSs due to its easy-to-use interface, its SEO friendliness (especially when boosted by certain plugins), and the ability to customize even the tiniest details of a site using frameworks, themes, and plugins. This really shows how savvy HostGator users are.

Speaking of SEO (search engine optimization), we found that HostGator users are pretty SEO-savvy as well. It turns out HostGator is the top 7th hosting provider of websites that have the Yoast SEO plugin installed. Yoast SEO is a comprehensive plugin that helps site owners set up their sites to not only be found, but rank well in the search engines.

Taking all of these other savvy choices into account, it seems that when you choose HostGator to host your site, it’s yet another smart decision that’s going to help set your website up for success.

HostGator: What Does Your Host Say About You?

At WhoIsHostingThis, we encounter hundreds of individuals hosting with different providers, and wanted to better understand what drives that decision. What a host say about a user? First up is HostGator…

Social Media Savvy

Facebook is 3.3x more popular than Twitter among HostGator users.

92% of HostGator users have a social media widget installed on their website. These businesses care about audience engagement and are looking to recruit new followers, proudly displaying their networks for site visitors to see. Among the social channels,

Among the social channels, Facebook seems to be the most valued representing 46% of social widgets, followed by Google+ at 19% and Twitter at 14%.

These businesses know where to find the visitors seeing that Facebook is the most popular social network, holding 72.4% of global market share (48.8% in the U.S.) compared to Twitter’s 4% (5.3% in the U.S.), according to karmasnack.com.

More importantly, HostGator users know how to make content go viral with Facebook being the number one social channel for sharing content, representing 50% of all socially shared content.

WordPress Fans

As the 10th top hosting provider of WordPress sites, 81% of HostGator users with a content management system (CMS) are using WordPress, compared to 8.6% using Joomla!, and only 0.3% using Blogger. In this area, HostGator users are comparable to the Internet as a whole with 8.3% of most websites using WordPress, 2.2% using Joomla!, and 0.2% using Blogger.

This indicates that users are comfortable managing their own content, are looking for customization, and want an array of plugins and widgets to choose from.

Smart About SEO

HostGator users know how to rank high in search results. It is the top 7th hosting provider of websites with Yoast SEO plugins installed for WordPress at 12% of users, compared to 1.2% of most websites.

Users also recognize the Google+ opportunity with 11% having the Google Plus Platform installed compared to 1.9% of most websites. 6.3% have the Plus One button vs. 1.5% of most websites.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, “Within search results, information tied to verified online [Google+] profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification.” Although Google+ only represents 2% of social sharing currently, a recent SearchMetrics study suggested that Google+ sharing will overtake Facebook by 2016.

The study saw that the number of Facebook shares grew roughly 10% per month, while Google+’s +1 growth was at 19% per month. A July 2013 study by Conductor.com revealed that Google+ personal accounts have seen a 10% increase in page-1 organic search placement in Google from January 2012 to May 2013.

Number Crunchers

97% of HostGator users are metrics-obsessed, using an analytics platform to measure their site traffic. These users want an in-depth look into how visitors are interacting with their site, and they want it for free.

The majority of HostGator users favor Google Analytics at 40%, compared to 6% using WordPress Stats and only 0.7% using Piwik. In comparison, 16.2% of most websites on the Internet use Google Analytics, 0.7% use WordPress Stats, and 0.5% use Piwik.

Data shows that HostGator users are more likely to use WordPress Stats than many other websites, ranking among the top 10 hosting providers.

Expert Communicators

As the 5th top hosting provider, HostGator users prefer aWeber as their email marketing provider. A HostGator user is 7x more likely to use aWeber than Constant Contact and 2.3x more likely than MailChimp. This shows that users prefer a provider with a long standing reputation at an affordable price.

Information Syndicators

The majority of HostGator users have installed RSS feeds to keep their audiences up-to-date with their latest content. They know they have something valuable to offer and believe in making useful information available for visitors who want to opt-in.

HostGator is the 10th top hosting provider for RSS (26% of users), Pingback Support (22%), and Really Simple Discovery (21%). Whereas 12.3% of most websites use RSS, 7.8% use Pingback Support, and 8.3% use Real Simple Discovery.