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The scoring rubric
Providers are scored on five weighted criteria. Weights are tuned per category (support weighs more for beginner shared hosting; performance weighs more for VPS), but the default split is:
- Performance
- 35%
- TTFB, regional latency, scaling headroom — from published specs, provider documentation, and independent public benchmarks.
- Price clarity
- 25%
- Renewal honesty, add-on cost surface, and whether the advertised price survives year two.
- Support
- 20%
- Channels offered, documented response targets, and independent customer reports.
- Reliability
- 15%
- Documented uptime SLAs and status-page transparency.
- Migration
- 5%
- Path in, path out, and lock-in surface.
How prices are verified
Every dollar figure on this site carries a verification date. A price is only published after we've checked it on the vendor's own pricing page (or the vendor's official documentation, or a same-day price tracker for the handful of vendors that block automated access). We record both the advertised entry price and the renewal price, because the gap between the two is the single most common hosting-billing surprise. Providers we haven't verified yet are labeled "Not yet price-verified" — we never fill the gap with a guess. Prices are re-verified on a quarterly rotation; the current pass is dated July 9, 2026.
What "tested" means here — honestly
Our reviews are desk-research driven: vendor documentation, published plan specifications, service-level agreements, status-page history, independent public benchmarks, and long-running community consensus (forums like LowEndTalk and r/webhosting, where actual customers report problems). We do not currently publish our own load-test or uptime numbers, and no page on this site claims a benchmark we didn't run. As we add hands-on testing, those results will appear with dates and methodology attached. Until then, provider pages without hands-on testing say so.
Who runs this site
Digital Hosting is owned and operated by TetraCore in Bowling Green, Ohio. Content is written and maintained by the Digital Hosting editorial team; we don't publish invented author personas or stock-photo bylines. Corrections and challenges to any claim are welcome via the contact page — if we got a price or fact wrong, we'll fix it and note the change.
How affiliate links work
Some outbound links are affiliate links: if you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Two things keep that honest. First, rankings and scores are set before monetization is considered — several of our top picks (Hetzner, Migadu, Cloudflare Registrar among them) pay us nothing. Second, providers whose affiliate program we haven't joined still get a working link straight to their public pricing page, labeled "See current pricing" rather than a deal we can't offer. The full policy is on the affiliate disclosure page.
What we don't do
- No sponsored placements — position on a page can't be bought.
- No invented ratings, user-review counts, or aggregate scores.
- No prices without a verification date attached.
- No "fastest host" claims without a published benchmark behind them.