How We Review Web Hosting Providers
How we check prices, test speed and rate every web host we review, and what our “Tested by us” label means.
Every hosting review on TopSiteHosters follows the same process. This page explains what we check, where our numbers come from, what the “Tested by us” label means and how we keep reviews up to date, so you can judge each review for yourself.
What We Check for Every Host
Whether or not we have bought a plan ourselves, every review covers the same ground.
- Pricing on the live site. We check the intro price and the renewal price on the provider’s own pricing page and in the checkout, not from a press release or another review.
- Terms and the SLA. We read the terms of service, the uptime guarantee and the money back policy, and note what they leave out.
- Speed tests. We test the provider’s own website with our Server Response Tester, GTmetrix, Pingdom and SpeedVitals, and use the average of the results for page load time and time to first byte (TTFB).
- Customer reviews. We read what customers say on Trustpilot and other review platforms, looking for patterns in support, billing and outages rather than single complaints.
- Independent data. We compare our findings with several independent sources for uptime and performance, and use them where we have no data of our own.
- Features and ownership. We check what each plan includes, what costs extra, and who owns the company, including any private equity or group ownership.
Averaging four speed tools gives a steadier result than any single test. Testing a provider’s own website is not the same as testing a customer site on a shared plan, though, which is why we compare our numbers with independent data and buy plans ourselves wherever we can.
What “Tested by Us” Means
Reviews marked “Tested by us” go a step further. For these hosts, we:
- Buy a hosting plan with our own account and payment details
- Set up a WordPress test site on that plan
- Run our speed tests against the test site itself, not just the provider’s homepage
- Contact support with real questions and judge the speed and quality of the answers
- Go through the dashboard, backups, email and other features as a customer would
We are adding more hosts to our own testing as the site grows. Every review shows clearly whether it carries the label, so you always know which kind of review you are reading.
How the Rating Works
Each host is rated out of 5 across five areas:
A high score in one area cannot make up for a weak one. A very fast host with poor support will not rank above a host that does well in all five.
| Area | What we look at |
|---|---|
| Performance and uptime | Average page load time and TTFB from our four tools, independent uptime data compared with the SLA, hardware such as NVMe storage, caching and CDN |
| Pricing and value | Renewal price as well as intro price, extra costs, money back policy and contract terms |
| Ease of use | Signing up, the control panel, installing WordPress, connecting a domain and finding backups |
| Support | Channels and hours, documentation, customer feedback, and our own support contacts for hosts we have tested |
| Features and scalability | What is included by default, backups, staging, email, and how easy it is to move to a bigger plan |
| Security | Free SSL, firewalls and malware scanning, account isolation, two factor login and how the host handles security incidents |
Where Our Numbers Come From
Every figure in a review comes from one of three places: our own tests, the provider’s live website, or independent data from monitoring services, benchmarks and customer review platforms. Where a number comes from someone else, we say so in the review rather than presenting it as our own result. We do not use figures supplied by the hosts themselves, apart from prices and plan details checked on their live site.
How We Keep Reviews Current
Hosts change prices, plans and infrastructure all the time. We recheck pricing regularly and update a review whenever a provider makes a significant change, such as a price increase, a new data centre or a change of owner. When a review has been meaningfully updated, the date appears at the top of the page next to the original publish date.
How We Make Money
TopSiteHosters is free to read. We earn a commission when you sign up with some hosts through our links, at no extra cost to you. These relationships are listed on our affiliate disclosure page.
Commissions never decide a rating. Providers cannot pay for a higher score, better coverage or a better position, and hosts we earn nothing from are reviewed in exactly the same way. Some of our highest rated hosts are ones we have no affiliate deal with.
Found Something Wrong?
Prices and plans change fast, and we sometimes miss an update. If you spot a wrong price, an outdated plan or any other mistake, let us know and we will check it and correct the review.
Who Writes the Reviews
Every review is researched and written by Jonathan Brown, a technical consultant and SEO advisor based in Bergen, Norway, who works daily with WordPress, server infrastructure and hosting migrations for European clients.
To see this process in action, browse our hosting provider reviews.
Changes to This Page
- October 2026: page published, covering our speed tests, rating areas and the “Tested by us” label