How We Test

Plans, specs and list prices are compiled from each provider's official documentation, pricing pages and public APIs.

Pricing changes often and our listing can lag the provider’s own page. Treat any price here as indicative and confirm it on the provider’s site before you buy.

Where we have run our own benchmarks, the result appears on that provider’s page and on our Benchmarks page, labelled with the date it was measured and whether the figure is ours or came from a third-party benchmarking project.

Our coverage is currently limited to a small number of providers. Most provider pages have no benchmark block at all, because we have not measured them — we would rather show nothing than estimate a number. A result is a snapshot of what we measured on the date shown; we do not currently re-run benchmarks on a fixed schedule, so check that date before leaning on a figure. Widening this coverage is work in progress.

Where we show an uptime figure, it is the provider’s own publicly published SLA commitment — not a figure we measured. It is a contractual promise, not observed uptime, and we do not currently run independent monitoring of our own.

Our ratings are editorial. They reflect our assessment of a provider’s specs, pricing, feature set and public track record, and they are set and reviewed by the ServerSpotter team rather than computed automatically from live measurements.

That means a rating is a judgement, not a benchmark score. Where we have measured something, the measurement is shown next to it so you can weigh the two separately.

Our ratings are not for sale. No provider can pay for a higher rating, and no payment changes what we write about a provider.

Placement is a different thing, and we would rather spell it out than let you assume. Providers can buy promotional placement from us — newsletter sponsorship and featured listing slots. A featured listing is labelled Featured and is ordered ahead of unpaid listings on the pages where it runs. It does not change the provider’s rating and it does not add a provider to a comparison it would not otherwise appear in.

We also earn affiliate commissions when you sign up through some links on our site. This comes at no extra cost to you and does not affect ratings, ordering or editorial content. Affiliate links are marked per FTC guidelines.

If you are a provider and something here is wrong, or a reader who has spotted an error, tell us and we will correct it.