Most hosting review sites are, frankly, garbage. They rank whoever pays the highest affiliate commission, slap “Editor’s Choice” on it, and call it a day. You’ve probably noticed.
We do things differently. Not perfectly, but differently.
We actually test things. Server response times across multiple regions. Uptime tracking over months, not days. Support tickets submitted at inconvenient hours to see what really happens. Security configurations. How things hold up when traffic spikes. We document our methodology and update it when the industry shifts, which it does constantly.
We pay for our own accounts. Anonymous ones. No vendor dashboards, no “partner portals,” no early access that might make us feel obligated. When we review a host, we’re experiencing what you’d experience.
We take affiliate money, and we’re upfront about it. Links on this site often earn us a commission. We disclose that. What we don’t do is let it dictate rankings. If a host pays well but performs poorly, we say so. This has cost us relationships. Fine.
The team has actually done this work. Managed infrastructure for startups, enterprises, everything in between. Dealt with the 3am outages, the migration nightmares, the support tickets that go nowhere. When we flag something as a problem, it’s usually because we’ve lived through it or watched clients live through it.
We look at the stuff nobody wants to talk about. Renewal pricing. Contract lock-in. What happens when you try to leave. Hosts love to advertise their intro rates. We care more about year two and year three.
We update things. Hosting quality changes. A provider that was excellent in 2022 might be coasting in 2026. We re-test. We revise. Sometimes we change our recommendations entirely, which can be awkward when we’ve previously said nice things.
We get things wrong sometimes. When readers point out errors or share experiences that contradict ours, we listen. We’ve updated reviews based on community feedback more than once. Probably will again.
None of this makes us infallible. But it does mean that when we recommend something, there’s actual reasoning behind it. Not just whoever’s paying the most this quarter.