Methodology
Hosting providers and their plans are manually reviewed before being added to our platform. Providers must meet our minimum objective quality criteria and inclusion requirements before they are eligible to be listed.
Our goal is to provide clear, comparable information about specific hosting plans, rather than maintain a comprehensive directory of every hosting company or individual server configuration available on the market.
Provider Quality Criteria
A provider must meet all of the following requirements:
- A claimed and verified profile on Trustpilot
- No known violations of Trustpilot’s Terms of Use
- A Trustpilot rating of 4.1/5.0 or higher
- At least 100 customer reviews
- Operating for more than one year
- Not primarily offering adult hosting services
These criteria are designed to establish a minimum level of provider reputation, operating history, and customer feedback before a company is included in our database.
Plan Comparability & Inclusion Requirements
In addition to meeting our provider quality criteria, a provider must offer hosting plans that can be reasonably researched, standardized, and compared with plans from other providers.
We may exclude providers when their pricing, product structure, plan configurations, or regional variations are excessively complex or difficult to research, maintain, or compare in a meaningful and consistent way. This may include pricing models where the final cost depends heavily on highly variable resources, custom configurations, usage-based billing, or other factors that prevent us from presenting a clear and reliable plan comparison.
This may also apply when a provider offers substantially different plans, pricing structures, or product configurations across multiple regional versions of its website, making it impractical to maintain a single consistent set of plan information.
This is particularly important for HostingCriteria because our database is designed around specific, comparable hosting plans, rather than individual server configurations or highly customized infrastructure.
Meeting the quality criteria therefore does not automatically guarantee inclusion. We may choose not to include an otherwise eligible provider when its plans cannot be researched and presented in a way that provides meaningful value to users.
Regional Variations
HostingCriteria generally uses the provider’s primary public website (typically the global .com website) as the reference source for plan specifications, features, and pricing information.
Hosting providers may display different prices, currencies, promotions, plan names, or product availability depending on the visitor’s location. As a result, information shown on HostingCriteria may differ from what a user sees on a provider’s local website.
Users should always verify final pricing and plan details directly with the provider before purchasing.
When a provider does not display pricing in USD on its primary public website, HostingCriteria may convert prices to USD for comparison purposes.
Inclusion & Research Priorities
There are many hosting providers that may meet our quality and inclusion criteria, but researching, verifying, and continuously maintaining detailed information about hosting plans requires significant time and resources. We therefore cannot practically research and maintain every eligible provider at the same time.
To make our research and maintenance sustainable, providers with active affiliate programs are generally prioritized for research and inclusion. Affiliate commissions help fund the ongoing work required to verify plan specifications, pricing, features, and other information published on HostingCriteria.
An affiliate relationship does not replace our quality or inclusion requirements. A provider must first meet our minimum criteria before it is considered for inclusion.
We do not charge providers for inclusion or sell higher positions in our comparisons. Having an affiliate relationship does not guarantee a particular ranking, position, or recommendation.
HostingCriteria is therefore not intended to be a complete directory of every hosting company. Our database is built progressively, with priority given to providers for which we can sustainably research and maintain detailed, comparable, and up-to-date plan information.
Providers without an affiliate program may still be considered for inclusion when research and maintenance capacity allows.
Shared Hosting Risk-Free Requirement
If a provider offers shared hosting plans, at least one of those plans must include either:
- a money-back guarantee, or
- a free trial period.
This ensures that entry-level users can evaluate the service without financial risk.
Ongoing Monitoring
Provider information and eligibility are monitored on an ongoing basis.
If a provider’s Trustpilot rating falls below 4.0, their plans are temporarily removed from search results, but the provider remains listed on our site.
If a provider no longer meets any of our other quality criteria, its plans will no longer appear in search results and the provider will be removed from our list of recommended companies. The provider’s existing data will remain accessible through direct links and search. A notice will be displayed on the provider’s page explaining that the company currently does not meet our quality criteria and is therefore not recommended by HostingCriteria until the requirements are met again.
If an existing provider’s affiliate program becomes unavailable, we may continue maintaining its plans where research and maintenance remain sustainable. Otherwise, its plans may be removed from active search results until a sustainable basis for maintaining detailed plan information is available again.