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 17 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.
What we have not done yet
This is a new build of a site on an old domain, and honesty about that matters more than looking finished:
- No provider has a numeric score yet. Capability data is loaded for all of them; the assessments are in progress. A Hostoholic Score implies we tested something, so it stays blank until we have.
- No pricing is verified yet. Same reasoning.
- We have not run our own performance benchmarks. When we do, they will be described here in enough detail to be repeated.
Corrections
Every provider page has a "report an error" button. Facts drift, and a comparison site that cannot be corrected is not worth reading.