How we rate hosting
The scoring, the weights, the sources and the gaps — published so you can check the reasoning rather than trust the conclusion.
Last updated 18 August 2026
Hostoholic exists because most hosting "reviews" are ranked by commission. Ours are not, and this page is how you hold us to that.
The Hostoholic Score
Every rated provider gets a score out of 100, weighted across six dimensions:
| Dimension | Weight | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | 25% | Server response, caching stack, CDN, behaviour under load |
| Reliability | 20% | Uptime record, redundancy, backup policy, recovery |
| Value | 20% | Total cost across the term, including the renewal |
| Support | 15% | Channels, hours, and whether the answers are any good |
| Features | 10% | Staging, email, SSH, Git, security tooling as standard |
| Ease of use | 10% | Control panel, onboarding, migration, assumed knowledge |
The weights are configurable by an editor, and the current values are always the ones shown above and used in the calculation.
What is deliberately not an input
Affiliate commission. The scoring function takes provider facts and editorial sub-scores. It has no parameter for payout rate, network, or whether a provider has an affiliate programme at all. That is an architectural decision rather than a promise — there is nowhere in the code to put it.
Whether we have a relationship with the provider. Several providers we cover have no affiliate programme we participate in. They are scored the same way and can outrank ones that do.
Missing data is not a zero
If we have not assessed a provider's support, that dimension is removed from the calculation and the remaining weights are renormalised. Scoring an unassessed dimension as zero would understate a provider for something we simply have not got round to, which would be a quiet form of dishonesty.
Every provider page shows which dimensions contributed and which were excluded.
Where the facts come from
Capability data — what a host offers, which panel it ships, whether it has UK regions — comes from the provider's own published documentation, recorded against a source URL and a date checked. Those sources are listed on each provider page.
We distinguish four states, and the interface shows which applies:
- Measured — we tested it ourselves
- Documented — publicly documented specification with a source
- Provider claim — a marketing claim, presented as one
- Awaiting check — not yet verified; shown as unknown rather than guessed
Pricing
We do not publish a price until an editor has checked it against the provider's own pricing page and recorded the date. Hosting prices change constantly, and promotional pricing changes weekly. A stale figure would look authoritative and be quietly wrong, so where you see "pricing not yet verified" that is exactly what it means — and the link takes you to the source.
How the sub-scores are produced
Four of the six dimensions are derived from documented facts by a published rubric, not typed in by hand. The rubric lives in the codebase, is unit tested, and re-runs whenever a fact changes — so the same inputs always produce the same score, and you can check the reasoning rather than trust it.
Features — a weighted checklist of capabilities, scored as the proportion present out of those we have verified. Staging and backups carry the most weight because their absence is what people regret; free SSL carries little because it is table stakes. Capabilities nobody has checked are excluded rather than counted against a provider, and the score is capped by how much of the checklist we have actually covered — full marks require a fully documented provider, not a thinly researched one.
Value — driven mainly by the renewal multiple. A £1.99 headline that becomes £13.99 is a 7x increase, and a value score that ignored that would reward exactly the behaviour this site exists to warn about. Flat monthly pricing with no introductory cliff scores highest. Price position against peers in the same currency and what you get for the money make up the rest.
Support — the documented channels, weighted by how much each actually helps when something is broken. A phone number counts for more than a community forum.
Ease of use — the most editorial of the four. Hosted builders score highest because there is nothing to administer; cPanel scores above a proprietary panel because the knowledge is portable; server-only products are marked down because they assume you can run a server.
What is deliberately not scored
Performance and Reliability are unrated on every provider. Between them they are 45% of the total weight.
Performance would need benchmarking real accounts on each host. Reliability would need uptime monitoring over months. We have done neither, so both are excluded from the calculation and every provider page names them as not assessed. The alternative — estimating them from brand reputation — would be the exact failure this site was built to avoid.
That means current scores are calculated across 25–55% of the total weight, depending on how much is known about a provider. Each provider page shows its own coverage. Treat the scores as a well-founded starting point rather than a final verdict, and read the categories that matter to you.
Corrections
Every provider page has a "report an error" button. Facts drift, and a comparison site that cannot be corrected is not worth reading.