How we collect and score hosting data

Every provider in the catalog gets its full pricing ladder captured, not a representative sample: every tier of every product we cover, with specs, at the provider's published list price. Wherever a provider offers a public pricing API, we pull from it directly. Where they don't, we capture their published pricing pages. A small number of figures that could only be sourced from third-party aggregators are flagged as lower-confidence in the tier notes rather than presented as confirmed.

Pricing is versioned, not overwritten. When a provider changes a price, we keep the old capture and record the new one with its date, so "last updated" on a provider page reflects a real verification, not a page refresh.

For providers with public pricing APIs, automated adapters re-check prices and diff them against our latest capture. Changes don't go live automatically: every detected change lands in a human review queue first, because automated diffs get things wrong in ways a human catches quickly (promotional SKUs, spot pricing, regional variants pretending to be the standard price).

Provider scorecards (price, uptime, performance, ease of setup, support, scalability, security) are 0–10 editorial judgments based on published specs, SLA terms, pricing structure, and documented capabilities — they are not synthetic benchmarks, and we say so rather than dressing them up as lab results. Running our own uptime and performance measurements is on the roadmap; until then, scores are informed opinion, applied consistently across providers.

Tool recommendations (the Provider Finder and Tech Stack Wizard) rank options with transparent weighted scoring — the results show the score and the factors that drove it, so you can see why something ranked first.

Right now, we don't: we have no affiliate relationships, and no link on this site is an affiliate link. In the future some provider links may become affiliate links, earning us a commission at no cost to you — but affiliate status will never affect pricing data, scores, or rankings; the same capture and scoring process applies to every provider. See the full affiliate disclosure.

Pricing changes constantly and we'd rather fix a mistake than defend one. If a figure looks wrong, tell us and include the provider page you were looking at.