How we evaluate hosting companies
Most "best hosting" lists rank whoever pays the highest commission. Here's exactly how ours works instead — what we score, what we test firsthand versus research, and how affiliate income does and doesn't touch the rankings.
What we score, and why it's weighted this way
Every company on our hosting page is scored across seven criteria. We weight them toward what actually breaks a small business — not spec-sheet numbers that sound impressive but rarely matter day to day.
What we test ourselves versus what we research
We're upfront that we're a small operation — not a lab with a server farm running synthetic uptime monitors for twelve months per host. Where we can, we run our own signup, setup, and support-ticket tests. Where firsthand testing at scale isn't practical, we build the score from verifiable sources: the company's own published SLAs and terms, its status-history page, and patterns across a large number of independent, recent customer reports — weighted toward specific, checkable complaints or praise over vague star ratings. We'd rather tell you where a score comes from than pretend everything was hand-tested in a lab we don't have.
How often this page is updated
Hosting pricing, plans, and policies change often enough that a "review" written once in 2023 and never touched again is close to useless. We revisit every listing at least monthly, and immediately whenever we're notified of a pricing or policy change by a provider.
How affiliate compensation affects — or doesn't affect — the rankings
We only apply to a company's affiliate program after we've decided it's good enough to recommend — not the other way around. We also won't feature a program that requires us to hide paid search restrictions, ban honest comparisons, or otherwise compromise what we'd tell a friend. Commission size varies company to company, and we're not going to pretend it's irrelevant to which programs we bother pursuing — but it does not change the order of the rankings themselves. If a lower-commission host is genuinely the better pick for a given use case, that's what we say.
Sources
Company pricing pages and published terms of service, official status/uptime history where published, and aggregated recent customer feedback across independent review platforms. We link out to primary sources where it's useful rather than asking you to take our word for it.