How We Test

How we evaluate providers, what we look at, and how ratings are calculated.

Our methodology

We evaluate every provider in our catalog using the same core criteria, so ratings stay comparable across shared hosting, VPS, managed WordPress, and cloud categories.

What we evaluate

  • Pricing transparency — introductory vs. renewal pricing, and how clearly it's disclosed at checkout
  • Plan specifications — published CPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth allocations, checked against the provider's current pricing pages
  • Feature set — backups, staging environments, security tooling, and control panel quality
  • Support model — available channels (chat, ticket, phone) and whether support is included or an upsell
  • Reputation — publicly available track record on uptime, billing practices, and cancellation/refund policies

How ratings are calculated

Each provider receives a 1–5 rating based on a weighted assessment of the criteria above. We revisit ratings when a provider changes pricing, discontinues a plan, or when new public information changes our assessment.

Keeping ratings current

We monitor provider pricing pages and public terms on a regular basis and update our catalog when they change. If you notice pricing or specs that are out of date, let us know — see the Contact page.

What this page is not

This is a research-based methodology: we verify specs and pricing against providers' own published information and public track record. We don't claim to have provisioned and lab-benchmarked every plan listed here.