Hostington
Open & Independent Evaluation Standards

Transparency & Affiliate Disclosure

How Hostington ranks web hosting plans, calculates real lifetime costs, and maintains 100% editorial independence from hosting providers.

FTC-Compliant Affiliate Disclosure

Hostington is reader-supported. When you click links on our site to visit a web hosting provider and choose to purchase a plan, we may receive an affiliate referral commission from that hosting provider at no additional cost to you.

Crucially, affiliate commissions never alter or influence our matching algorithm, plan scores, or recommendation rankings. A provider offering a higher affiliate payout cannot buy a top position or bypass our strict technical compatibility requirements.

How Our Recommender Engine Works

Unlike generic review directories that publish static "Top 10" lists based on commercial deals, Hostington operates a deterministic multi-stage recommendation pipeline:

1. Hard Technical Filtering

We filter out plans that fail your essential requirements (e.g. Node.js runtime, Python versions, Docker support, root SSH access, minimum RAM thresholds, or MySQL database limits).

2. Transparent Pricing & Plan Details

We evaluate entry pricing, promotional periods, commitment terms, and regular renewal rates where disclosed by hosts to help you anticipate overall expenses.

3. Weighted Scoring Match

Qualified plans receive a match percentage calculated from spec headroom, storage architecture (NVMe SSD), uptime track record, and developer tooling fit.

Our 4 Transparency Guarantees

  • No Paid Placements: Hosting companies cannot pay to be listed first or artificially inflate their match score.
  • Specs-First Matching: If a plan does not have the RAM, storage, or runtime your application requires, it will never be recommended.
  • No Artificial Paywalls: Hostington's questionnaire and recommendations are 100% free for all users with zero registration walls.
  • Continuous Spec Auditing: Plan limits, server architectures, and renewal terms are continuously updated against actual provider offerings.

Experience Unbiased Hosting Recommendations

Run your project requirements through our recommender engine to find exact server matches.

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